From Pitú to Whisky: The Changes of a Programmatic Party under Clientelism

• In Event: Party Change and Party Adaptation in Democracies under Pressure

Abstract

While there is a growing literature on parties in Latin America about party-system collapse (Seawright 2012; Roberts 2013; Cyr 2015, 2016), adaptation (Levitsky 2003), or, more recently, the emergence of new parties (Anria 2013, Poertner 2021), there is less discussion about how established parties were able to expand their constituency significantly. The leftist Workers' Party's (PT) growth in Brazil, particularly in the country's northeast region, is a fascinating example of this type of constituency expansion. The PT's inroad into the Northeast was unprecedented in Brazil's history, as it represented the first time that a leftist programmatic party was able to win office in states that conservative political clans have historically controlled. The PT's newfound power in the Northeast meant that the party was able to gather the support of the poor and uneducated, a segment in which the PT had historically fared poorly.

How could the PT reach the unorganized poor in municipalities historically immersed in clientelist politics? The growth of the PT among the poor has raised a debate in the literature. For one strand of the literature, the growth of the party in these smaller rural areas was a result of the party's strategy to organize and increase its presence in conservative-dominated areas by opening new local offices (Samuels and Zucco 2014; Van Dyck and Montero 2015). Another strand of the literature argues instead that the PT's growth in the poorest areas of Brazil was a result of the party's embracing of standard political practices in Brazilian politics, specifically the use of the resources and prerogatives of executive offices at higher levels and the accommodation of local elites in the party tickets (Alves 2018; Alves and Hunter 2017). This paper contributes to this debate by providing further evidence of the importance of adopting traditional political practices and the alliance with traditional elites to explain the electoral growth of the PT. More importantly, we propose that the significance of the party's adaptation towards traditional politics resides in its symbolic value.

This paper examines the historical trajectory of the PT in one area of the rural Northeast, the Sertão of Bahia, to uncover through the point of view of local petistas (PT partisans) the difficulties that they faced to reach the unorganized poor and the strategies that they sought to implement to garner the support of this segment of the population. Through an in-depth study of three different local chapters of the party in the Northeast, the paper unveils how party members came to adopt the view that their programmatic campaign practices and the social and racial origins of their members hindered their ability to become electorally competitive in a context where clientelist lenses and styles of politics were dominant. Based on this view, the chapter illustrates how some local chapters of the party decided to adopt traditional clientelist campaign practices and to alter the face of the leadership of the party to fit broader expectations of how strong politicians look and campaign, even as this change meant obliterating the historical members of the party from disadvantage backgrounds. Through these changes, local chapters of the party were able to disassociate themselves from the image of weakness in politics to build new reputations as strong and viable electoral contenders. In other words, these changes represented the conscious efforts of the party and its leadership to overcome their lack of cultural capital within the dominant clientelist culture of politics. The paper also discusses how the party's interpretation of its difficulty in gaining the poor because of its image as poor and weak was indeed reflected in dominant views among the electorate. As oral testimonies with voters reveal, voters perceived the PT as a party of troublemakers and an irrelevant actor in local politics. Finally, to provide further support to the importance of the symbolic value of these transformations, the chapter also compares the electoral trajectory of the party in three towns of the Sertão of Bahia in which the leadership has adopted different stances in the extent to which these symbolic changes were implemented.

Author

• Mariana Borges Martins da Silva, University of Southampton