Party and Democracy in Brazil with Frances Hagopian , Associate Professor of Political Science and a faculty fellow and former Director of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame.

Thursday, February 19, 4PM.

CUNY’s Graduate Center,Rooms C203/C204

365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th Street), New York City.

Brazilian parties have long been believed to be among the weakest in Latin America, hobbled by shallow roots in the electorate, high rates of electoral volatility, and unfaithful politicians. Yet, contrary to the conventional wisdom, party-oriented legislators have emerged and party discipline has been on the rise since the early 1990s. Why this has occurred is explained by the ways in which market reforms made programmatic electoral strategies more valuable than patronage-based ones. An original survey of the Brazilian Congress illuminates the nature of partisan campaigns, party polarization on policy, the values legislators attach to party program, and voter loyalty. Politicians prefer to observe party discipline and delegate authority to party leaders rather than switch parties.

Frances Hagopian is Associate Professor of Political Science and a faculty fellow and former Director of the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame. She studies the comparative politics of Latin America, with emphasis on democratization, the political economy of economic reform, and religion and politics in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. She is editor of Religious Pluralism, Democracy, and the Catholic Church in Latin America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); co-editor (with Scott Mainwaring) of The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America (Cambridge 2005), and author of Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge, 1996), as well as articles and book chapters.

In 2007-2008 she was a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has previously taught at Harvard and Tufts Universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Selected publications : Contemporary Catholicism, Religious Pluralism, and Democracy in Latin America
(editor, forthcoming, University of Notre Dame Press); The Third Wave of Democratization in Latin America: Advances and Setbacks (coeditor, Cambridge University Press, 2005); Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil (Cambridge, 1996), which was named a Choice outstanding book in Comparative Politics; numerous articles on democratization in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, and other journals and books, including “Derechos, representación, y la creciente calidad de la democracia en Brasil y Chile,” Política y Gobierno 12 (1) 2005, and "Political Development, Revisited," Comparative Political Studies 33(6-7), part of a special double issue, Comparative Politics in the Year 2000.