Building Parties from City Hall: Party Membership and Municipal Government in Brazil

Under what conditions does local incumbency help a party recruit new members? In this article, I use a regression discontinuity design to study the consequences of municipal incumbency for party membership recruitment in Brazil, and I find that the effect of incumbency on grassroots party building is conditional on the party's prior level of institutionalization. Municipal incumbency increased membership recruitment only among centralized and programmatic parties that already had a well-established organizational presence in the municipality, and it was ineffective and sometimes even counterproductive for weaker parties. I also find evidence that the incumbency advantage for institutionalized parties is only partly explained by patronage, and incumbency helps these parties recruit high-intensity members who seek to participate in the party and who remain affiliated with the party even when it is no longer in power.