David Samuels’s research while affiliated with University of Minnesota Duluth and other places

What is the source of the Partido dos Trabalhadores’ (PT) success? And is the PT likely to thrive into the future as a key player in Brazil's party system? In this paper we weigh in on an emerging debate about Lula's role in the PT's rise to power. Without Lula's ability to win more votes than his party, we might not be discussing lulismo at all, much less its difference from petismo. Yet despite Lula's fame, fortune, and extraordinary political capabilities, lulismo is a comparatively weak psychological phenomenon relative to and independently of petismo. Lulismo mainly reflects positive retrospective evaluations of Lula's performance in office. To the extent that it indicates anything more, it constitutes an embryonic form of petismo. The ideas that constitute lulismo are similar to the ideas that constitute petismo in voters’ minds, and they have been so since the party's founding – a nonrevolutionary quest to make Brazilian democracy more equitable and more participatory. Both lulismo and petismo are key sources of the PT's strength, but petismo is likely to endure long after Lula has departed the political scene.

Political theorists and empirical scholars have long assumed that democracy and participation are necessarily in tension. Partly for this reason, research on participatory democracy has focused on “mini-publics”—relatively small-scale and/or local practices. Through an exploration of Brazil's National Public Policy Conferences, we provide the first evidence that participatory governance practices can directly shape important national public policy outcomes at the national level. Our findings call into question the longstanding critique that participatory practices are impractical on a large scale and thus unimportant to the overall functioning and quality of democracy. We find that participatory practices can deepen democratic regimes by opening the doors for greater and more direct civil society input into the substantive content of national governance.

Scholars and practitioners express concern that parties in “third wave” democracies are poorly developed, compared to parties in older democracies. We suggest that parties vary in their organizational “capacity”, focusing on parties' ability to select trustworthy executive agents. Capacity is higher where parties can vet potential executive talent by observing future leaders over time in the legislature – an increasingly available option as democracy matures. The key distinction in parties' use of this option lies in the delegation structure between a party and the executive. Parliamentary systems offer a clear line of delegation, which parties control. In presidential systems, parties must recruit executive candidates who can win a popular election, requiring characteristics that may not be well correlated with those that make them good party agents. As parliamentary democracy matures, we find a steady increase in prime ministers' average length of prior legislative service. For presidents, there is significantly weaker growth in prior legislative service. We also theorize about and investigate patterns in semi-presidential democracies. Our findings suggest that the institutional format of the executive is more important for party capacity in new democracies than the era in which a democracy was born.

This article quantifies books' impact in terms of citation counts—in published articles and in other published books. The average political science book published by a university press receives about three times the number of citations received by an article indexed in the SSCI. Books' impact varies by subfield, with books published in methodology receiving many more citations on average than books published in other subfields, followed by books in international relations. Overall, books published on American politics are cited least frequently. Results suggest that political scientists should supplement quantitative indicators of article and journal impact (which are based only on citations in peer-reviewed articles) with similar measures that account for the scholarly influence of published books.

This report presents sample characteristics and summary statistics from the Brazilian Electoral Panel Study (BEPS) project. The survey, composed of three waves, was conducted in Brazil in 2010, a presidential election year, and is composed of 4,611 interviews with 2,669 voting-age Brazilians.

What is the source of the Partido dos Trabalhadores’ (PT) success? And is the PT likely to thrive into the future as a key player in Brazil’s party system? In this paper we weigh in on an emerging debate about Lula’s role in the PT’s rise to power. Without Lula’s ability to win more votes than his party we might not be discussing lulismo at all, much less petismo, yet we argue that despite Lula’s fame, fortune, and extraordinary political capabilities, lulismo is a relatively weak psychological phenomenon relative to and independently of petismo. In the main, lulismo reflects positive retrospective evaluations of Lula’s performance in office. To the extent that it reflects something more, it constitutes an embryonic form of petismo. The ideas that constitute lulismo are similar to the ideas that constitute petismo in voters’ minds, and have been so since the party’s founding — a non-revolutionary quest to make Brazilian democracy more equitable and more participatory. Both lulismo and petismo are key sources of the PT’s strength, but petismo is likely to endure long after Lula has departed the political scene.

To what extent do party labels influence individuals’ policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the US, where party identification can generate both in-group and out-group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented party system. In such an environment, do parties function as in-groups, out-groups --- or neither? We answer this question through two survey experiments, one conducted on a nationally-representative sample and another on a convenience sample recruited via Facebook. We find that both in- and out-group cues shape the opinions of identifiers of Brazil’s two main parties, but that cues have no effect on non-partisans. Results suggest that party identification can structure attitudes and behavior even in ``party-averse'' environments.

We consider Facebook’s utility for subject recruitment in social-science survey experiments, highlighting in its potential - particularly relative to MTurk (Berinsky et al. 2012) - to spur research outside the US, and on targeted demographic groups inside the US. We then assess the external and internal validity of experiments performed on subjects from three different pools of Brazilian respondents: a national probability sample, an in-person convenience sample of university students, and an on-line convenience sample recruited via Facebook. As with US samples recruited via MTurk, our Facebook sample was more representative than a college student sample but less representative than a national sample. However, to the extent representativeness is a concern in experimental research, Facebook’s vast user base offers the possibility of post-stratification, something unlikely using MTurk. Facebook also offers the prospect of demographic targeting almost anywhere in the world, an ability to rapidly generate large samples, ease in obtaining meta-statistics, and relatively low cost per respondent. Most importantly, subjects recruited via Facebook entail little loss in terms of internal validity.

How does mass partisanship emerge? We explore the varying fates of parties in Brazil - a decidedly anti-party environment in which social-cleavages and historical legacies cannot explain the emergence of partisanship - and highlight a heretofore unexplored mechanism of crafting mass partisanship that sets the PT (Workers' Party) apart from other parties: its deliberate efforts to reach out to organized elements in civil society by expanding its local-level organization. We show that the PT invested where civil society was organizationally dense, and that this led to increased party identification and improved electoral performance. Other parties, for path-dependent reasons, did not adopt this tactic - and in the context of weak socio-cultural cleavages, have failed to gain partisan support.

To date, research on participatory practices has focused on the impact of participation in “mini-publics”, small-scale and/or local practices. We provide the first evidence that participatory governance practices can, through a process that does involve representation and delegation, be both scaled up to the national level and that shape important outcomes at the “macro” democracy level. This finding undermines the most obvious objection to the significance of participatory practices: that they are impractical and thus unimportant to the functioning of democracy.