Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2014, 9: 269–300

Brokered Politics in Brazil:

An Empirical Analysis∗
Daniel W. Gingerich
Department of Politics, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400787,
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4787, USA; dwg4c@virginia.edu

ABSTRACT

An emerging literature emphasizes the importance of vote brokers for

electoral politics in the developing world. Yet in spite of the great inter-
est in the topic, attempts to assess the impact of vote brokerage on elec-
tion returns are exceedingly rare. This paper provides the first explicit
assessment of the electoral returns to politicians from purchasing the
allegiances of brokers. It does so by drawing upon a unique dataset
documenting the allocation of off-the-books payments to vote brokers
during a gubernatorial reelection campaign in the Brazilian state of
Minas Gerais. The study finds that in the typical municipality buying
off local brokers was associated with a 4–6 percentage point increase in
the vote share obtained by the governor. All told, the findings suggest
that vote brokerage is a resilient form of political linkage that can shape
vote choice even in contexts of vote secrecy and intermediate levels of
economic development.

∗
The author would like to thank Pablo Beramendi, John Echeverri-Gent, Frances Hagopian,
Herbert Kitschelt, David Lewis, Olivia Miljanic, Virginia Oliveros, Karen Remmer, David
Samuels, Hillel Soifer, the Editors, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Duke

Online Appendix available from:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00013040 app
Supplementary Material available from:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/100.00013040 supp
MS submitted 12 April 2013 ; final version received 30 April 2014
ISSN 1554-0626; DOI 10.1561/100.00013040

c 2014 D. W. Gingerich
270 Gingerich

Contemporary political science offers three main explanations for why

voters vote as they do. According to the spatial theory of voting, choices
in the voting booth reflect the calculations of voters about which party
or candidate will best advance their particular bundles of policy prefer-
ences (Downs, 1957; Enelow and Hinich, 1984). The foundational text of the
behavioral paradigm holds that vote choice is governed by deeply ingrained
preferences over party labels that are acquired through socialization within
the home (Campbell et al., 1960). The canonical historical institutional-
ist account of voting emphasizes that vote choice depends largely upon
how a voter’s social identity maps onto enduring cleavages in a polity, be
these defined by religion, ethnicity, class, or some other marker of difference
(Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). What unites these disparate visions of voting
behavior is a commitment to the notion of voter autonomy: voters cast votes
the way they do because they believe their choice best represents their pol-
icy concerns, best reflects their personal or familial values, or best satisfies
an obligation to the social group to which they belong.
Generations of empirical scholarship illustrate that the explanatory value
of these frameworks is considerable, especially for polities in the industri-
alized world (cf. Adams et al., 2005; Bartolini, 2007; Lewis-Beck et al.,
2008). Nevertheless, the crucial role that voter autonomy plays within these
accounts imposes some limitations on their temporal and cross-national
applicability. An element missing from these accounts, one whose absence
might be keenly felt by anthropologists and historians of democratic prac-
tice, is the role of influence.
In using this term, I refer to the possibility that voters may vote in par-
ticular ways because they have been instructed to do so by an authoritative
figure who enjoys some degree of legal, financial, or even spiritual leverage
over the citizens within his community. Often such individuals serve as vote
brokers due to their ability to market the votes of their followers. Given the
independent bases of their power, these figures issue directives that may or
may not correspond with voters’ policy preferences, partisan identities, or
social group belongings. As such, in a setting where the leverage of such
individuals is strong, observed electoral outcomes may diverge — sometimes

University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, and the annual meetings of the
American and Midwest Political Science Associations for helpful comments and suggestions.
Special thanks go to Ana Araújo Alves for excellent research assistance.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 271

significantly — from those which would have obtained had voters freely dis-
posed of their votes as their consciences dictated.
Although scholars have demonstrated the existence of local elite influence
in elections in societies as diverse as Ancient Rome (Davis, 1910), Victorian
England (Moore, 1975), Imperial Germany (Anderson, 2000), nineteenth
century United States (Bensel, 2004), postwar southern Italy (Graziano,
1973), and contemporary Senegal (Schaffer, 1998), a commonly encountered
view is that the phenomenon is a fleeting artifact of incomplete demo-
cratic development. In particular, treatments of the topic have historically
emphasized its relationship to non-secret voting and a traditional agrarian
economy (Lemarchand and Legg, 1972; Scott, 1972; Baland and Robinson,
2008, 2012).
The standard claim linking the visibility of the vote to the electoral power
of local elites is based upon a monitoring logic: if local elites can observe
how their dependents vote, they can condition economic benefits or coercion
upon individual vote choice, thereby ensuring that their dependents vote as
directed. Contrariwise, it is argued that if the vote is secret, the enforcement
of such quid pro quos becomes difficult (if not impossible) and the electoral
power of local elites correspondingly withers on the vine. Based on this
reasoning, some recent political economy models imply that information
about individual vote choice plays an important role in facilitating the ability
of brokers to deliver the votes of their dependents to politicians or parties
interested in contracting their services (Baland and Robinson, 2008, 2012;
cf. Robinson and Verdier, 2013).
The role of an agrarian economy (and socio-economic backwardness more
generally) in sustaining the influence of elite vote brokers has been adduced
to several factors. Firstly, agrarian economies are typically characterized by
poverty and gaping inequalities of wealth, conditions under which patron-
client relations are thought to be especially strong (Foster, 1961; Eisenstadt
and Roninger, 1984, cf. Kitschelt, 2000; Weitz-Shapiro, 2012). Secondly,
the traditional social hierarchies characteristic of such economies suppos-
edly produce a culture of deference according to which dependent voters
come to believe it is normatively appropriate to abide by the instructions
of their patrons (cf. Wolf and Mintz, 1957; Moore, 1975; O’Gorman, 1984).
Thirdly, agrarian economies restrict the geographical mobility of many cit-
izens, a circumstance that allows brokers to better monitor the behavior of
their dependents and control access to political information (Kitschelt and
Wilkinson, 2007; Hicken, 2011).
272 Gingerich

Taken to their logical conclusion, these arguments about the importance

of vote visibility and a traditional agrarian economy for the efficacy of vote
brokerage would imply that the dictates of local elites should no longer be
a relevant electoral force in most democracies, as the fully secret vote has
been adopted nearly everywhere and most citizens now live and work in
urban or suburban areas with diverse forms of economic production. Yet a
rich body of case study research shows that vote brokers remain active in a
number of areas throughout the developed and developing world, including
democracies where the ballot is secret, the population is urbanized, and
economic activity is diversified across the agricultural, industrial, and service
sectors (Auyero, 2000; Brusco et al., 2004; Gay, 1994; Krishna, 2002; Wang
and Kurzman, 2007).
Quite naturally, a growing analytical literature on contemporary vote bro-
kerage has reacted to this state of affairs by attempting to provide the theo-
retical underpinnings for why and how the practice persists in environments
previously thought to be inhospitable to its existence. The literature clari-
fies the reasons politicians might be inclined to draw upon the services of
vote brokers, describes the strategies brokers can utilize to influence vot-
ers under a secret ballot, and assesses the bargaining power brokers enjoy
within their political organizations. Three central insights can be gleaned
from this work. Firstly, the services of vote brokers appear to be especially
coveted by politicians in new democracies where weak party labels make
it next to impossible to offer credible policy platforms to voters or where
detailed information about voter preferences is scarce (Keefer and Vlaiçu,
2008; Zarazaga, 2014). Secondly, there are a variety of mechanisms that
may explain how the influence of brokers on voters can persist under the
secret ballot. Those emphasized in the literature include iterated face-to-
face contact (Stokes, 2005), the mobilization (or demobilization) of subsets
of the electorate whose ideological preferences over candidates are known
to brokers (Nichter, 2008; Dunning and Stokes, 2008; Gans-Morse et al.,
2014; Rosas et al., 2014), the use of outcome-contingent voting and turnout
contracts that reward or punish sets of voters based on aggregate electoral
outcomes (Smith and Bueno de Mesquita, 2011; Gingerich and Medina, 2013;
Rueda, 2014), and the exploitation of strong reciprocity norms (Finan and
Schechter, 2012; Lawson and Greene, 2012). Thirdly, opportunism by bro-
kers appears to be a serious threat to politicians (Camp, 2011; Stokes et al.,
2013), albeit one that can be mitigated by encouraging demonstrations of
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 273

mobilizational prowess such as broker-organized rallies or by tightening the

fit between the areas in which brokers operate and the jurisdictions in which
votes are counted (Larreguy, 2013; Szwarcberg, 2012).
For all the understanding that has been generated by this work, a skep-
tical reader could argue that it may be placing the cart before the horse.
That is because while the brokerage literature has carefully addressed at a
theoretical level why and how vote brokerage may persist, it has failed to
establish empirically that vote brokers are still able to systematically carry
the vote for those politicians who have contracted their services. Until this
step has been taken, one simply cannot reject the claim of the older body of
work that vote brokerage requires the visibility of the vote and an agrarian
economy in order to play a truly significant role in electoral outcomes. Given
the trend towards increasingly sophisticated analyses of the whys and hows
of brokerage, a careful empirical investigation of whether it is important in
shaping electoral outcomes seems more than warranted.
Motivated by the growing theoretical interest in the role of vote brokers
in comparative politics along with a scarcity of direct empirical evidence
regarding their influence, the current paper takes up the difficult task of
systematically assessing the electoral importance of vote brokerage in a con-
temporary democratic setting. It does so by examining the phenomenon
within a particular geographic unit: the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil.
The recent history of the state provides students of clientelism with an
invaluable opportunity to study this topic. In September 2007, an investiga-
tive report written by the Brazilian Federal Police revealed the existence of
a large scale illicit campaign financing scheme that took place in the state
in 1998. The monies generated by the scheme were used to purchase the
allegiances of local power brokers on behalf of the sitting governor during an
important gubernatorial reelection contest. Remarkably, the police report
contains detailed tables of bank account transactions that list the names of
recipients of the under-the-table funds along with the amounts they received.
The plurality of the recipients were low-level politicians running for slots in
the state legislature who, according to their own sworn depositions, were
bribed in an explicit attempt to sway their endorsements and/or rent their
electoral machinery for the benefit of the governor. Thus, the dynamics of
the scheme and the paper trail it generated offer researchers a fairly direct
glimpse into the surreptitious exchanges that characterize patterns of vote
brokerage.
274 Gingerich

Using the data contained in the report in conjunction with a set of aux-
iliary data sources, this paper provides a descriptive analysis of the char-
acteristics of the low-level politicians who were bought in the scheme along
with an assessment of the impact of the scheme on electoral returns. I find
that the politicians who were bought generally fit the profile of what the
historiography on Brazilian electoral politics refers to as coronéis: corrupt
local bosses who utilize their dominance over the levers of power at the
municipal-level to deliver voters on behalf of state elites vying for high-level
elected office. In particular, for each state deputy candidate (SDC) running
in Minas Gerais in 1998, I created a local bossism index which was found to
be strongly predictive of a candidate’s having been bought in the scheme.
Most importantly, the paper shows that the scheme bore real electoral fruit:
conditional on a wide range of political, economic, and demographic indica-
tors, municipalities dominated by bought SDCs exhibited significantly more
favorable changes in support for the governor than municipalities not dom-
inated by the SDCs purchased in the scheme.
These findings offer two general lessons to the comparative literature on
voting behavior in developing democracies. Firstly, they underscore the point
that clientelistic voter mobilization may often rely more on bargains between
upper-level politicians and local vote brokers than on direct exchanges
between upper-level politicians and voters. Political middlemen really do
matter: the wave of studies investigating the sources and use of their power
are studying something important. Secondly, the findings underline the stay-
ing power of traditional mechanisms of influence in polities undergoing socio-
economic modernization. As a wealthy state within a middle income polity
where individual vote secrecy is enforced by the national justice system,
Minas Gerais is not an obvious locale for broker-based political mobilization.
The persistence of vote brokerage in this ostensibly inhospitable setting sug-
gests that the practice may play an underappreciated role in other locales
as well.

1 Mensalão Mineiro: Background and Context

1.1 Outline of Events

The series of events referred to as the mensalão mineiro (henceforth MM)

provides this paper with an inside look into the dynamics of vote brokerage.
The MM was a scheme hatched in 1998 to use money embezzled from public
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 275

institutions in the state of Minas Gerais in order to finance the reelection

campaign of the sitting governor, Eduardo Brandão de Azeredo.1 A stalwart
of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), Azeredo ran that year as
head of a ticket that garnered the support of an array of right-leaning parties.
Azeredo’s main challenger was Itamar Franco of the Party of the Brazilian
Democratic Movement (PMDB), a well known Minas politician who had
served as president of Brazil from 1992 to 1995. Faced with a popular oppo-
nent and dismal poll numbers, the governor’s campaign nucleus joined forces
with ex-banker and publicist Marcos Valério Fernandes de Souza to create
a parallel campaign finance architecture designed to shift the tide in the
governor’s favor. The effort proved successful in raising funds, although it
was ultimately insufficient to clinch victory for Azeredo (the final tally was
Franco 58%, Azeredo 42%).
In order to raise money, Marcos Valério took out several multimillion dol-
lar loans in the name of two publicity firms in which he was a partner.
The monies from these loans were redirected into the coffers of the Azeredo
campaign or allocated directly to individuals of the campaign committee’s
choosing. Following the disbursement of funds, principal and interest on the
loans were repaid through fraudulent publicity contracts signed by various
state owned enterprises in Minas Gerais, deposits made into the accounts of
the firms by public contractors with a continuing relationship with the state
of Minas Gerais, and through debt forgiveness by the bank that originated
the loans.
Much of this ill-gotten money was directed to lower-level politicians.
In particular, dozens of candidates running for a variety of legislative posts
(the best represented among these being the post of state deputy) were
given sums of money drawn directly from the accounts controlled by Marcos
Valério. After the scheme had been uncovered by the Federal Police, many
of these individuals produced depositions admitting that the money was
provided so that they would drum up support for Azeredo in their electoral
bailiwicks (Zampronha, 2007, pp. 110–113). In other words, black money
was funneled into paying off local vote brokers.

1
The description of events in this section of the paper is largely drawn from Inquiry (Inquerito)
no. 2280-2/140 written by Luı́s Flávio Zampronha of the Brazilian Federal Police (Zampronha,
2007) and the subsequent indictment filed by the Public Prosecutor, Antonio Fernando de
Souza (de Souza, 2007). Other sources consulted include Figueiredo (2006) and various editions
of the newsweeklies Isto É, Veja, and Época.
276 Gingerich

Years after the election, an internal dispute within the Azeredo campaign
nucleus resulted in the Brazilian Federal Police becoming aware of scheme.
The police then poured over bank records, internal records from public agen-
cies, and sworn testimonies in an effort to trace the flow of funds. Investi-
gators used the bank account records of the publicity firms to create tables
listing the names of individuals who had withdrawn funds from the accounts
during the campaign and the amounts that they withdrew. These tables
provide hard evidence of candidates receiving funds from the MM and are
publicly available in Inquiry (Inquerito) no. 2280-2/140 (http://s.conjur.
com.br/dl/relatorio.pdf). They are the primary basis of the statistical anal-
yses conducted in this paper.

1.2 Context

Why would it make sense for a gubernatorial candidate to purchase the

support of SDCs in this way? Candidates for state (and federal) deputy
in Brazil compete for office under an open list variant of d’Hondt propor-
tional representation in large multimember districts that encompass entire
states. The combination of open lists and territorially large, high magnitude
districts generates an intense form of geographically targeted personal vote
seeking that typically manifests itself in efforts by deputies to carve out
informal bailiwicks in a small number of usually contiguous municipalities
(cf. Ames, 1995). Cultivating personal contacts and allegiances in these areas
is a crucial component of electoral success (Bezerra, 1999). For this reason,
in Brazil’s personalistic and localized system of legislative representation,
purchasing the endorsement of an SDC can be interpreted as an attempt
to exploit the personal following and connections of the candidate within
his bailiwick. In essence, it is a gambit to transfer voter allegiances from a
native son to a more distant patron.
Exchanges of this nature have long existed in Brazil. An extensive lit-
erature details the crucial role of local elites in the dynamics of state and
national elections during the country’s First and Second Republics, epochs
which spanned the periods 1889–1930 and 1945–1964, respectively. The cen-
tral figure in this work is the coronel, a local political boss who routinely
negotiated the electoral support of his destitute followers in exchange for
the injection of funds for municipal improvements and/or for improvements
in his own personal wellbeing.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 277

Much of the early work on coronelismo (political brokerage by local

notables) viewed the phenomenon as intrinsically rooted in latifundium agri-
culture and the capacity of elites to manipulate local election administra-
tion (Leal, 1949; Vilaça and Albuquerque, 2003 [1965]). The coronel, in this
vision, was first and foremost a large landowner whose control over the
local agrarian economy constituted the central basis of his power. Yet with
the passage of time and the observed persistence of coronelismo in spite of
the modernization of the Brazilian economy and repeated electoral reform,
the characterization of local bosses and the sources of their power changed
substantially. Although the rural character of brokerage continued to be
stressed, treatments of the topic began to emphasize that local bossism was
ultimately less about landed power and more about control over the munic-
ipal bureaucracy (Carvalho, 1966; Greenfield, 1977; Hagopian, 1996; Hoefle,
1985; Mainwaring, 1999). Key to the political dominance of a coronel was
serving directly as mayor or exercising effective control over the individuals
who did. Corruption and patronage were often held to be central ingredients
of such dominance, with armies of ward heelers (cabos eleitorais) described
as being bankrolled with funds from the municipal treasury or with promises
of government jobs (cf. Carvalho, 1958). As such, from the mid-twentieth
century onward, the profile of the prototypical vote broker encountered in
the literature is of a rural notable with direct or indirect influence over
the municipal bureaucracy and a record of exploiting public resources for
political ends.

2 Who Gets Bought?

In this section of the paper, I make use of information about the personal
backgrounds of the state deputy candidates (SDCs) who ran for office in 1998
in Minas Gerais in order to ascertain what makes some low-level politicians
more attractive interlocutors for high-level politicians than others in vote
brokerage operations like the MM. My primary interest lies in examining
whether or not SDCs who fit the profile of corrupt local bosses–effectively,
modern day coronéis –were more likely to have been bought in the MM than
candidates with a different profile. A positive finding would be indicative of
historical continuity in the structure of political clientelism in Brazil.
In addition to the bank account records collected by the Federal Police,
I draw upon two sources of data in the analysis. The first is the website of
278 Gingerich

the Regional Electoral Tribunal of Minas Gerais, which provides informa-

tion on electoral returns and party affiliation along with basic background
characteristics of candidates. The second is the general archive of the same
institution (located in the state capital of Belo Horizonte) which, in con-
formity with Brazilian law, contains detailed files for each candidate. These
files were scoured in order to discover any criminal indictments the SDCs
may have faced before or at the time they registered their candidacy along
with a listing of the elected posts they held prior to the election.
Matching the names included in the bank account records with the list
of all SDCs, I found that 44 had withdrawn funds from the accounts con-
trolled by Marcos Valério. The payments ranged in value from R$1,500 to
R$50,000, with the median payment among those receiving funds from the
scheme equal to R$15,000 (approximately US $13,000 in 1998 dollars). Of the
28 parties that fielded candidates in the election, 11 had candidates who
received funds from the accounts. Among these, there was a preference for
PSDB copartisans in the allocation of funds (16 recipients), as well as a pref-
erence for SDCs belonging to parties located fairly close to the center-right
PSDB in the ideological spectrum.
To assess if the Azeredo campaign nucleus targeted SDCs who were in
effect local bosses, I developed a local bossism index based upon the char-
acterization of coronéis in the previously described literature. The index,
which has three components, captures features of SDCs that might make
them attractive as potential vote brokers (demand side characteristics) or
that would indicate their inclination to accept off-the-books funds in order
to bring out the vote (supply side characteristics). The first component is
ficha suja (dirty file); this is a binary variable equal to 1 if the candidate had
been indicted for corruption or electoral crimes prior to running in the elec-
tion, 0 otherwise. On the demand side, this variable is indicative of an SDC’s
willingness to exploit state resources in order to bring out the vote, poten-
tially making her an attractive target for the governor’s campaign nucleus.
On the supply side, it reflects an ethical disposition that would make it more
likely that an SDC would be receptive to a cash-for-local-support scheme.
As both of these traits are emblematic of local bossism, I expect the index
to be higher for SDCs who have a ficha suja than those who do not.
The second component of the index, former mayor, taps into the local
political strength of the candidate. This is an ordinal variable equal to 0 if
the candidate had never served as a mayor prior to his run for state deputy,
1 if the candidate had served a single term as a mayor prior to his run, and
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 279

2 if the candidate had served multiple times as a mayor prior to his run.
Since having been a mayor is considered a valuable asset for a local boss,
the index should be increasing in this variable.
The final component of the index is electoral dominance, a measure derived
from the work of Ames (1995). Dominance taps into the degree of electoral
control enjoyed by a candidate in the localities that make up his bailiwick.
It is equal to the sum, across all municipalities, of the percentage of the per-
sonal votes won by a candidate in a given municipality multiplied by the per-
centage of votes that municipality contributes to his vote total. SDCs with
high dominance scores have strong electoral control over their bailiwicks; as
such, the local bossism index should be increasing in electoral dominance.
Both the former mayor and dominance variables primarily reflect demand
side characteristics of SDCs.
The interrelationships among the indicators used in the bossism index are
exceptionally strong, suggesting that they do tap into a similar underlying
trait of SDCs (see the on-line Appendix for formal tests of independence).
The indicators were collapsed into a one-dimensional index using a Bayesian
factor analysis model applicable to situations in which observable indicators
of a latent trait consist of a mix of continuous and discrete variables (Quinn,
2004). Using the fitted model, I created factor scores for each SDC in the
sample, which were normalized to lie between 0 and 1. Higher levels of the
index denote greater conformity of the SDC to the profile of an ideal-typical
local boss.2
With the index in hand, a series of ordered probit regression analyses were
utilized to examine the relationship between local bossism and other factors
on the receipt of funds from the MM. The dependent variable contained
three categories: no receipt of funds, the receipt of funds in an amount less
than or equal to R$10,000, and the receipt of funds in an amount greater
than R$10,000. Also employed in the regression analyses were a suite of
explanatory variables that included incumbency status, the party label on
which the SDC ran, formal educational attainment, the age of the candidate,
the sex of the candidate, and the profession of the candidate.3

2
In conformity with expectations, all indictators were related to the latent factor (bossism) in
the same way and all relevant model parameters were statistically significant by any reasonable
metric of significance. A table displaying the posterior density summary for the factor analysis
model is presented in the online appendix of this paper along with a figure depicting the
empirical density of the bossism index.
3
Since a candidate’s party label perfectly predicts the non-receipt of funds in the full sample
of candidates, the analyses were limited to the 466 SDCs running on the labels of parties
280 Gingerich

Table 1 presents the results. I began with a reduced form model that
included only the local bossism index, incumbency, and party affiliation
(Model 1). The coefficients on both local bossism and incumbency were pos-
itive and statistically significant, implying that SDCs running for reelection
and those who fit the profile of the typical local boss were more likely to
receive greater amounts of funds from the scheme than SDCs with different
characteristics. Also significant was the coefficient on membership in the
PSDB, which suggests that, all else equal, the governor’s campaign nucleus
preferred to target copartisans. Introducing the full suite of covariates, as
was done in Model 2, did not change the findings: the coefficients on each of
the aforementioned variables remained positive and statistically significant.
In Models 3–5, the bossism index was left out and instead each component
indicator used in the index was entered into the regression equation, one at
a time. All of these were signed in the expected direction and were statis-
tically significant. However, none of the component indicators used in the
bossism index explained variation in the receipt of funds as well as the index
itself. In the final regression model (Model 6), I included all component
indicators used in the bossism index simultaneously. Given the very strong
multicollinearity between these indicators, each lost statistical significance
when this was done.4
Using the regression results, I performed several simulation analyses in
order to gauge the impact of local bossism and having had a prior record for
corruption on the receipt of funds from the MM. The quantity of interest
was the average predicted probability (APP) of a given outcome category
when all units in the sample are assigned the same value of the explanatory
variable of interest. In the first simulation, Model 2 was utilized to calculate
APPs for each of the three outcome categories as the local bossism indicator
was varied from its minimum (0) to maximum (1). The top panel of Figure 1
displays these APPs along with the corresponding 90% and 95% confidence
intervals (obtained using the percentile bootstrap method). As demonstrated
by graphs, SDCs who fit the profile of a local boss were much more likely

that had at least one candidate receive funds from the MM. Thus, the regressions have the
interpretation of explaining variation in the amount of funds received from the MM for those
SDCs who, based on party affiliation, were actually eligible to receive funds.
4
All of the analyses were also run using a probit specification in which the dependent variable
was set equal to 1 if an SDC had received any funds from the MM, 0 otherwise. The results are
presented in a table in the on-line Appendix. None of the substantive findings of this section
of the paper were affected by this change in specification.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 281

Table 1. Ordered probit regression of determinants of receipt of funds from

the mensalão mineiro.
Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5 Model 6

Incumbent 1.40∗∗∗ 1.41∗∗∗ 1.45∗∗∗ 1.63∗∗∗ 1.41∗∗∗ 1.40∗∗∗

(0.24) (0.26) (0.26) (0.26) (0.27) (0.28)
Party PSDB 0.64∗ 0.74∗∗ 0.92∗∗ 0.79∗∗ 0.85∗∗ 0.78∗∗
affiliation (0.35) (0.38) (0.37) (0.38) (0.37) (0.38)
(base = PDT) PFL −0.30 −0.32 −0.16 −0.27 −0.25 −0.26
(0.44) (0.47) (0.46) (0.47) (0.47) (0.47)
PPB 0.12 0.21 0.22 0.20 0.20 0.21
(0.41) (0.43) (0.44) (0.43) (0.43) (0.44)
PTB −0.12 −0.08 0.05 0.01 0.01 −0.05
(0.42) (0.45) (0.45) (0.45) (0.45) (0.45)
PL −0.21 −0.17 −0.14 −0.14 −0.17 −0.13
(0.52) (0.55) (0.55) (0.54) (0.55) (0.55)
PSD 0.46 0.62 0.65 0.66 0.67∗ 0.64
(0.38) (0.42) (0.42) (0.41) (0.41) (0.42)
PSC 0.44 0.70 0.59 0.62 0.66 0.66
(0.45) (0.50) (0.50) (0.49) (0.50) (0.50)
PAN 0.46 0.76 0.77 0.70 0.80 0.80
(0.59) (0.61) (0.58) (0.60) (0.59) (0.59)
PMN −0.41 −0.35 −0.15 −0.30 −0.21 −0.25
(0.51) (0.56) (0.53) (0.55) (0.54) (0.55)
PSB −0.12 −0.01 0.10 0.07 −0.05 0.04
(0.51) (0.53) (0.52) (0.52) (0.54) (0.53)
Local 1.51∗∗∗ 1.42∗∗∗ — — — —
bossism index (0.40) (0.42)
Ficha suja — — 0.55∗∗ — — 0.39
(0.24) (0.26)
Ex-mayor — — — 0.68∗ — 0.47
(one term) (0.37) (0.39)
Ex-mayor — — — 0.06 — 0.17
(multiple terms) (0.28) (0.28)
Dominance score — — — — 1.47∗∗ 0.86
(0.75) (0.86)
Cutpoint. 1 2.14∗∗∗ 3.77∗∗∗ 3.63∗∗∗ 3.16∗∗∗ 3.72∗∗∗ 3.46∗∗∗
(0.31) (0.97) (0.98) (0.95) (0.98) (1.01)
Cutpoint. 2 2.56∗∗∗ 4.21∗∗∗ 4.06∗∗∗ 3.58∗∗∗ 4.14∗∗∗ 3.90∗∗∗
(0.32) (0.97) (0.98) (0.96) (0.98) (1.02)
N 466 466 466 466 466 466
AIC 276.9 286.9 292.7 295.0 294.1 295.4
Controls included?
(Age, sex, profession) No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Note: Standard errors in parentheses; ∗ denotes statistically significant at the 90% level, ∗∗ denotes
statistically significant at the 95% level, and ∗∗∗ denotes statistically significant at the 99% level.
282 Gingerich

Figure 1. Relationships between personal characteristics of SDCs and the

receipt of funds from the mensalão mineiro.
Note: The graphs in the top panel display the change in the average predicted probability
(for each outcome category) associated with an increase in the local bossism index for all
units from 0 to 1. The graphs in the bottom panel display the change in the average pre-
dicted probability associated with switching all units from ficha suja = 0 to ficha suja = 1.

to receive funds from the scheme than those who did not. For a randomly
selected SDC, an increase in the bossism index from 0 to 1 is associated with
an increase in the probability of receiving an amount of funds in the interval
(0,R$10,000] of 0.07 (from 0.03 to 0.10) and an increase in the probability
of receiving funds in the interval (R$10,000, R$50,000] of 0.17 (from 0.03
to 0.20). Thus, the APP associated with receiving any positive amount of
funds from the MM increases by about 0.25 (from 0.05 to 0.30), a substantial
jump.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 283

In the second simulation, Model 3 was utilized to calculate average pre-

dicted probabilities for the three outcome categories as the ficha suja vari-
able was varied for all units from 0 to 1. The lower panel of Figure 1 displays
the density of the average predicted probability for ficha suja = 1 and the
density of the average predicted probability for ficha suja = 0 for each of
the three outcome categories. The graphs in the panel show that SDCs with
a prior record for corruption were substantially more likely to have received
funds from the MM than those without such a background. For a randomly
selected SDC, changing the ficha suja variable from 0 to 1 is associated with
an increase in the probability of receiving some positive amount of funds of
0.08 (from 0.08 to 0.16).
All told, the analysis provides a clear characterization of the type of
lower-level politician who was purchased in the MM. Relative to other state
deputies, these were individuals who were likely to have built up their politi-
cal careers via stints in the mayor’s office, who had a proven penchant for cor-
ruption, and who were capable of dominating the vote at the municipal-level.
In short, these were individuals who backgrounds conformed in a number of
important ways to the image of the local boss developed in historiograph-
ical work on local-level electoral politics in Brazil. Thus, the targeting of
resources to low-level politicians in the MM suggests that a fairly classical
pattern of vote brokerage was present in state-level politics in Brazil up to
the turn of the new millennium.

3 Does Buying Off Local Bosses Work?

The fact that local vote brokers have been operative in recent campaigns
does not necessarily imply that they have retained the ability to bring out
the vote on behalf of the high-level politicians who cut deals with them. In
other words, the phenomenon of vote brokerage could very well exist without
having much electoral relevance. To address the question of relevance, this
section of the paper assesses the electoral impact associated with contracting
the services of local brokers. Specifically, it seeks to evaluate whether or not
the purchase of the SDCs included in the MM proved effective in augmenting
Azeredo’s vote share in the 1998 election.
In order to gauge the impact of the scheme, the paper exploits variation in
electoral outcomes at the municipal-level within the state of Minas Gerais.
A total of 719 municipalities were included in the analysis. The outcome
284 Gingerich

variable, denoted by ∆i , is equal to the difference, for municipality i, between

the vote share won by Azeredo in the second round of the 1998 election
and the second round of the 1994 election.5 The variable whose impact the
study would like to estimate (the ‘‘treatment’’) is denoted by Ti . It is equal
to 1 if the majority of votes within municipality i in the 1998 legislative
election were cast for SDCs whose loyalty had been purchased in the MM, 0
otherwise. If purchasing the allegiance of SDCs was electorally effective, then
one should find that those municipalities that were dominated by SDCs who
had been purchased in the MM (Ti = 1) should exhibit a more favorable over
time change in electoral support for the governor than those municipalities
not dominated by SDCs purchased in the scheme (Ti = 0). The logic here
is one of vote transference. For brokerage to be effective, low-level bought
politicians must be able to transfer some of their own popular support to
the high-level politician who has paid for their loyalty.
Differencing the dependent variable, as is done here, is useful for building
credible inferences from the data for two reasons. Since the treatment was
activated between the first and second time periods, any impact it exerted
should be discernible from the over time change in vote share for the gov-
ernor. Secondly, potential confounding due to time invariant, unobservable
characteristics of municipalities is greatly weakened by differencing the
dependent variable.
The benefits of differencing notwithstanding, confounding might still
threaten the study if one does not properly condition on relevant pre-
treatment covariates. These are characteristics of municipalities, measured
prior to the onset of the MM, that are potentially related to both the ten-
dency to support the types of candidates that are targeted in schemes like
the MM and to the evolution of support for the governor over time. The
statistical profile of the typical bought SDC comes in handy in framing this
problem of covariate selection. From the work of the previous section, it is
clear that bought SDCs generally fit the profile of corrupt local bosses and
that many shared the same partisan affiliation as the governor. Thus, one
needs to condition on characteristics of municipalities associated with the
existence of boss rule and local support for the governor’s party.

5
Some municipalities underwent a process of “emancipation” during this period, meaning that
they split from an existing municipality and legally registered themselves as a new, independent
one. In cases where this occurred, the electoral returns in 1998 for newly created municipalities
were pooled with their municipalities of origin in order to ensure intertemporal comparability
with the municipalities extant in 1994.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 285

Denote the vector of such indicators by Zi . As elements in this vector,

I selected variables that fell into seven main categories: indicators of urban-
ization (logarithm of population size, logarithm of number of registered
voters, percentage of the workforce that labors on a farm), indicators of eco-
nomic deprivation (logarithm of gross municipal product per capita, income
inequality [Theil’s L statistic], life expectancy, the infant mortality rate,
number of doctors per thousand residents), indicators of citizen education
and access to political information (average years of schooling for individ-
uals 25 years and older, rate of illiteracy among individuals 15 years and
older, percentage of elementary school teachers with a university degree,
percentage of homes with a radio, percentage of homes with a black & white
TV, percentage of homes with a color TV, percentage of homes with a tele-
phone), indicators of the religious and ethnic composition of the municipality
(percentage of population that self-classifies as Catholic, percentage of popu-
lation that self-classifies as white, percentage of population that self-classifies
as black), indicators that tap into the degree to which local bosses might
exert control over citizens’ employment and income (percentage of workforce
employed in public administration, percentage of population for whom gov-
ernment transfers consist of more than 50% annual income, percentage of
population consisting of retirees or pensioners), measures of local support
for the governor’s party (an indicator variable denoting whether or not the
PSDB won the 1996 contest for mayor in the municipality, a variable denot-
ing the vote share in the municipality of the PSDB presidential candidate
(Fernando Henrique Cardoso) in the second round of the 1994 presidential
contest, and a variable denoting the vote share in the municipality of the
PSDB in the municipal council elections held in 1996), and, finally, an indi-
cator of local-level investment made by the Minas Gerais state government
during Azeredo’s term in office (per capita transfers to the municipality
from the state government for capital expenditures during the 1995–1998
period).6

6
Covariates are drawn from four sources: Brazil’s 1991 census (IBGE, 1991), the statistical
yearbook of Minas Gerais (Governo de Minas Gerais, 2002), the online databank of the Institute
for Applied Economic Analysis (IPEA, http://www.ipeadata.gov.br), and the website of the
Regional Electoral Tribunal of Minas Gerais (www.tre-mg.jus.br). All covariates were measured
in 1991 unless otherwise noted. A table displaying descriptive statistics for the covariates (across
treatment groups) is presented in the online Appendix of this paper.
286 Gingerich

4 Methods

4.1 Framework

In order to estimate the impact of the endorsements of bought candidates on

electoral support for the incumbent governor, the paper draws upon the so-
called Rubin–Holland–Neymann potential outcomes framework. Following
the framework, each municipality i has two potential outcomes, ∆i (1) and
∆i (0). The first represents the change in the incumbent governor’s vote
share that would have occurred in municipality i had the governor purchased
the endorsements of SDCs who controlled the majority of the vote in said
municipality. The second represents the change in the incumbent governor’s
vote share that would have occurred in the municipality had the governor
failed to purchase the endorsements of SDCs who controlled the majority of
the vote. Only one potential outcome can be observed for any given unit,
namely, the potential outcome corresponding to the value of the treatment
actually received.
The estimand of interest is the average treatment effect for the treated
(ATT). This quantity reflects us how much, on average, having bought the
support of those SDCs controlling the majority of the vote in a municipality
affected the governor’s change in vote share in those municipalities domi-
nated by bought SDCs. Since the potential outcome ∆i (0) cannot be directly
observed for any of the units in the treatment group, the estimation of this
quantity requires the imposition of a key assumption called parallel paths.
The assumption states that, conditional on the pre-treatment covariates,
the average over time path of electoral support for the governor in those
municipalities controlled by bought SDCs would have been parallel to the
average over time path of electoral support for the governor in municipal-
ities not controlled by the bought SDCs had the local bosses in the former
set of municipalities not been bought. This requires that all characteristics
of municipalities relevant in explaining both the likelihood of being con-
trolled by bought SDCs and the evolution of electoral support for Azeredo
are included in Zi . Although parallel paths is both a strong assumption and
one that is not empirically verifiable, the fact that the analysis brings to
bear an unusually rich covariate set greatly enhances its plausibility.
Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that reasonable objections to the
parallel paths assumption can certainly be made. For instance, it is possible
that there might have been prior targeting of gubernatorial campaign events
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 287

or electoral propaganda in the same municipalities where local bosses were

eventually bought, a state of affairs which in theory could make it difficult
to identify the effect of buying off local bosses. The paper’s research design
attempts to address such concerns through the inclusion of the measures of
prior local support for the governor’s party in the covariate set. Since prior
campaign activities and/or propaganda are likely to be concentrated in areas
where the local infrastructure of the governor’s party is strong, condition-
ing on prior electoral support for the party helps the paper distinguish the
impact attributable to local bosses from that due to such campaign activ-
ities. In any case, the paper performs a variety of sensitivity analyses to
gauge the degree to which any residual departures from the parallel paths
assumption threaten the core findings of the study.

4.2 Estimation

Once one makes the parallel paths assumption, there are a variety of statisti-
cal conditioning strategies available to estimate the ATT. I utilize three tech-
niques based on the use of an estimated propensity score (propensity score
weighting, nearest neighbor matching, local linear matching) and two which
directly condition on covariates (coarsened exact matching, linear regres-
sion). The propensity score techniques and coarsened exact matching provide
algorithms for creating a comparison group among the control units that is
as similar as possible to the set of treatment units in terms of the values
taken on by the pre-treatment covariates. After a satisfactory comparison
group has been created, the mean difference in outcomes between the treat-
ment group and comparison group is utilized as the estimate of the ATT.
Linear regression, by contrast, attempts to adjust for confounding by provid-
ing a fully parametric specification of the relationship between the outcome,
treatment, and covariates. In this approach, assuming the regression model
is correctly specified and unit-level treatment effects are constant, the coef-
ficient on the treatment variable can be utilized as an estimate of the ATT.
Different propensity score techniques use an estimated propensity score in
different ways. Propensity score weighting creates a comparison group for
the treated units by weighting the outcome for each control unit by the odds
of assignment to treatment (Hirano and Imbens, 2001). This gives greater
weight to those control units that were likely to have received the treatment
given covariates and less weight to control units that were unlikely to have
received the treatment. Nearest neighbor matching creates a comparison
288 Gingerich

group by matching each unit within the treatment group to the unit in
the control group that is its closest match in terms of the value of the
estimated propensity score (Rosenbaum and Rubin, 1985). All control units
not so matched are then discarded from the analysis.7 Local linear matching
employs first-order local polynomial regression in order to match each unit
in the treatment group to a weighted average of the units in the control
group, where the weight assigned to each control unit is a function of the
distance between said unit and the target treatment unit being matched
(Heckman et al., 1997).8
In the coarsened exact matching approach, the analyst discretizes her
continuous covariates into user chosen blocks within which any remaining
differences across units are deemed to be substantively unimportant (Iacus
et al., 2011). She then exactly matches each treatment unit to one or more
control units based on the newly discrete-valued covariate matrix, dropping
from the analysis any treatment or control units without exact matches.9

4.3 Covariate Balance

The use of matched sampling techniques is motivated by the aim of providing

balance on the covariates. In other words, the analyst seeks to ensure that
the treatment group and the matched control group are similar in terms of
the values of all pre-treatment covariates. Only if this goal is achieved can
a study reasonably claim that it holds constant the influence of potentially
confounding factors in its empirical analysis.
Using standardized differences, Figure 2 shows the degree to which balance
on covariates was lacking in the raw data as well as the improvements in
balance that were gained through the use of a given matched sampling proce-
dure. Imbalance on covariates in the raw data was substantial.10 Municipal-
ities controlled by local bosses purchased in the MM looked quite different

7
I employed nearest neighbor matching with replacement in utilizing this method.
8
This estimation strategy relies on the choice of a symmetric distance metric called a kernel
and an associated bandwidth parameter. I utilized a Normal kernel with a bandwidth equal to
0.8.
9
Given the data hungry nature of this technique, I had to be selective in my use of covariates
when employing it. In particular, I exactly matched on discretized versions of four continuous
covariates (population size, gross municipal product per capita, average years of schooling,
radio ownership) as well as the binary indicator denoting whether or not a municipality’s mayor
belonged to the PSDB. The continuous covariates were divided into six blocks whose cutpoints
consisted of the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles of each variable.
10
Following standard practice, I interpret a standardized difference of 0.25 or greater in absolute
value as indicating serious imbalance in a covariate.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 289

Figure 2. Improvements in covariate balance due to conditioning procedure.

on background characteristics than those where the loyalties of the leading

vote getters were not purchased: they were less populated, poorer, more
rural, exhibited worse health outcomes, had less access to education and
political information, were more Catholic, and leaned more heavily in favor
of the PSDB.
Fortunately, the study was able to achieve an impressive degree of covari-
ate balance using the conditioning strategies. Whereas 18 out of 25 covariates
showed signs of serious imbalance in the raw data, none of the covariates
showed serious imbalance after employing any one of the matched sampling
strategies. Thus, all the techniques utilized in the paper passed the minimum
290 Gingerich

threshold for producing a comparison group for the treatment units that
held constant the values of confounders.

5 Results

In all of the estimations conducted, the electoral impact of purchasing the

support of local bosses was found to be positive and statistically significant.
Depending on the technique utilized, the estimated ATT varied from a high
of 0.06 (propensity score weighting, local linear matching matching) to a
low of 0.04 (nearest neighbor matching).11 The probability values associated
with the null hypothesis of no positive effect of buying off local bosses were
below 0.05 for each of the estimation techniques utilized.
Substantively, the findings state that a municipality randomly selected
from among the group whose local boss or bosses had been purchased in
the MM experienced an increase in the change in vote share for Azeredo
of between 0.04 and 0.06 relative to that which would have obtained had
said bosses not been bought off. In this regard, the paper’s evidence clearly
suggests that the efforts of the Azeredo campaign nucleus to purchase the
allegiance of local bosses was effective in building electoral support for
the incumbent governor, even though it was ultimately insufficient to turn
the tide of the election. Vote brokerage can still pay electoral dividends in
contemporary Brazil.

5.1 Robustness Checks

In order to provide a rigorous assessment of the strength of the results pre-

sented above, this section of the paper submits the analysis to a series of
robustness checks. There are four such checks. The first examines the degree
to which the estimates of the impact of purchasing local bosses depend upon
the choice of covariates used in the statistical conditioning process. The sec-
ond examines the sensitivity of the findings to departures from the parallel

11
The estimates of the ATT according to covariate conditioning technique were as follows (95%
confidence intervals in brackets): propensity score weighting: 0.06 [0.02, 0.09], nearest neighbor
matching: 0.04 [0.00, 0.08], local linear matching: 0.06 [0.02, 0.09], coarsened exact matching:
0.06 [0.02, 0.10], linear regression: 0.05 [0.03, 0.08]. User written R code was utilized to imple-
ment the propensity score weighting and local linear matching estimators. Confidence intervals
for these estimates were produced using the nonparametric bootstrap. Nearest neighbor match-
ing employed the Matching package and the uncertainty estimates provided therein. Coarsened
exact matching employed the cem package and the uncertainty estimates provided therein.
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 291

paths assumption. The third evaluates the degree to which the methods uti-
lized are susceptible to the risk of producing false positives (in the sense of
reporting statistically significant effects when in truth none exist). The final
check examines whether the substantive findings are maintained when the
treatment is reconceptualized as a continuous variable.

5.1.1 Choice of Covariate Set

My first step is to evaluate the sensitivity of the findings to the specifica-
tion of the covariate set. In doing so, I am motivated by the notion that
a finding of a positive causal effect evident in a wide variety of possible
specifications of the covariate set deserves greater confidence than a similar
finding present in only a few such specifications. To evaluate whether the
data exhibit covariate specification robustness of this type, I proceeded in
the following manner. Firstly, I randomly selected a subset of covariates from
the full set utilized in the analysis above, with each covariate in the full set
given a probability of 0.5 of being selected into the subset. Next, using the
randomly selected subset, I then estimated the ATT using the propensity
score weighting procedure. Finally, I repeated this process 10,000 times and
graphed the histogram of the resulting treatment effect estimates. Figure 3
presents the histogram.
In not a single one of the 10,000 configurations of the covariate set was the
estimated ATT anywhere close to 0 or below. Rather, the estimates oscillated
in a fairly narrow band between 0.040 and 0.063. Thus, this exercise suggests
that the estimates of the effect of buying off local bosses are highly unlikely
to be artifacts of which covariates were chosen for inclusion in the analysis
from the total set available.

5.1.2 Sensitivity to Violations of Parallel Paths

Of course, it is certainly possible that there are unobservable variables that
could have affected the likelihood that a municipality was dominated by
local bosses purchased in the MM and that might have also been related to
the evolution of support for the governor over time. If so, the parallel paths
assumption would be violated and the paper’s estimates of the ATT would
be biased. Naturally, one would like to evaluate if such potential violations
represent serious threats to the study’s findings.
292 Gingerich

Figure 3. Robustness of ATT estimate to selection of observed covariates

utilized in conditioning set.

A framework for formal sensitivity analysis developed by Guido Imbens

provides a means of conducting such an evaluation (Imbens, 2003). The
approach allows the analyst to examine how the linear regression estimate
of the ATT would change as result of a confounding process in which a
binary unobserved covariate, equal to 1 for half the sample and 0 for the
rest, exerts an impact on both treatment assignment and the outcome. The
sensitivity analysis assumes that: (1) treatment assignment can be repre-
sented by a logistic specification in which the observed covariates and the
unobserved confounder enter into the linear predictor in an additively sepa-
rable manner; (2) potential outcomes can be represented by a normal linear
specification in which the treatment, observed covariates, and unobserved
confounder similarly enter into the outcome model in an additively separable
manner. The two key (user controlled) parameters are δ, the coefficient on
the unobserved confounder in the outcome model, and α, the coefficient
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 293

on the unobserved confounder in the treatment assignment model. (Intu-

itively, the quantity α/4 expresses the maximal possible impact of the unob-
served covariate on the probability of assignment to the treatment group.)
By iteratively setting δ and α to fixed values then solving for the coeffi-
cient on the treatment in the outcome model, the analyst can examine how
much confounding would have to be present in order to change the sign of
the ATT.
Figure 4 presents the results of such a sensitivity analysis. The parameter
δ was varied from 0 to 0.30 for five different values of α/4: 0.05, 0.10, 0.15,

Figure 4. Robustness of ATT estimate to the presence of an unobserved

binary confounder.
Note: In the sensitivity analysis, the parameter δ is the coefficient on the unobserved
covariate in the outcome model, whereas α is the coefficient on the unobserved covariate
in the treatment assignment model (inverse logit specification).
294 Gingerich

0.20, and 0.25. As the figure shows, only for very high values of both param-
eters, i.e. extreme confounding due to an unobserved covariate strongly cor-
related with both treatment assignment and the outcome, did the estimated
ATT dip below 0. To give an example, even if α/4 were equal to 0.25, which
would represent an extremely strong impact of the covariate on treatment
assignment, the ATT would still be above zero unless the unobserved covari-
ate also increased the proportion of the vote going to the governor from
one election to the other by more than 0.22, an enormous amount. Overall,
the sensitivity analysis shows that small to moderate levels of confound-
ing due to an unobserved covariate would not be sufficient to overturn the
paper’s finding that buying off local bosses improved the governor’s electoral
support.

5.1.3 Placebo Test

An important tool for assessing the adequacy of non-experimental evaluation
techniques is the placebo outcome test (Heckman and Hotz, 1989; Rosen-
baum, 1989). In such a test, the researcher exploits the knowledge that cer-
tain outcomes, based either on logical considerations or detailed knowledge
of the social and political environment, cannot possibly be affected by the
treatment. If, contrary to this a priori knowledge, the utilization of a given
non-experimental evaluation technique suggests that a strong relationship
between the treatment and such outcomes does exist, then this constitutes
evidence of failure in the application of the technique. In the setting exam-
ined here, a finding of a significant relationship between the treatment and a
placebo outcome could point to a potentially serious violation of the parallel
paths assumption.
I utilized as the placebo outcome Azeredo’s vote share in the second round
of the 1994 gubernatorial campaign. Since the MM began during the cam-
paign of 1998, it is logically impossible that the scheme studied here could
have affected then candidate Azeredo’s vote share in 1994. However, if the
conditioning strategy has failed to include key characteristics of municipali-
ties that are related to both the eventual electoral penetration of the bought
SDCs and generally favorable attitudes towards Azeredo, then the estima-
tors could very well report a strong positive or negative relationship between
the electoral domination of bought SDCs and electoral support in 1994.
When conducting the estimations using the placebo outcome, I found that
the estimated ATT was not significantly different from zero for any of the
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 295

conditioning strategies. Indeed, in all cases the estimated ATT was only
about 0.01.12 Thus, on the basis of the placebo outcome test one can con-
clude that confoundedness of the form described above, if it exists at all,
does not appear to constitute a serious threat to the study’s estimates of
the impact of the purchase of local vote brokers.

5.1.4 Levels of Broker Dominance

A potential objection to the results presented thus far could be that the
study has artificially dichotomized municipalities into those controlled by
SDCs bought in the MM and those not controlled by bought SDCs. To
address this concern, I reran the analyses with the treatment expressed as a
continuous variable. Specifically, Ti was set equal to the proportion of votes
cast within municipality i in the 1998 legislative election for SDCs whose
loyalties had been purchased in the MM. My expectation is that, if the
directives of local bosses are electorally relevant, then those municipalities
where Ti is high (indicating a high level of dominance by bought local bosses)
should show a more favorable change in electoral support for the governor
than those municipalities where Ti is low (indicating a low level of dominance
by bought bosses).
In order to estimate the impact of the endorsements of bought candi-
dates on electoral support for the incumbent governor, I drew upon general-
ized propensity score methodology (Hirano and Imbens, 2004; Flores, 2007).
The methodology provides a flexible approach for conditioning on covari-
ates using a continuous estimated propensity score. The goal is to estimate
the average dose–response function (ADRF), µ(t) = E[∆i (t)], at a variety
of different points within an interval T =[t, t] ⊆ [0, 1]. The ADRF can be
interpreted as follows: if in each municipality in the sample the governor had
purchased the loyalty of SDCs representing (100 · t)% of the popular vote,
µ(t) would be the expected value of the change in the governor’s vote share
for a randomly selected municipality in the sample. Full estimation details
for this method are described in the on-line Appendix.
Figure 5 depicts the estimated effect of the level dominance by bought
deputies on the true outcome of interest (the change in Azeredo’s vote share

12
Ninety five percent confidence intervals for the placebo outcome ATT were as follows: propen-
sity score weighting: [−0.01, 0.04], nearest neighbor matching: [−0.02, 0.05], local linear match-
ing: [−0.01, 0.04], coarsened exact matching: [−0.02, 0.04], linear regression: [−0.01, 0.03].
296 Gingerich

Figure 5. Estimated dose response functions for true outcome (change in

governor’s vote share, 1994–1998) and placebo outcome (governor’s vote
share 1994).
Note: Estimated dose response functions are denoted by thick black lines. Ninety-five
percent confidence intervals are denoted by thin dashed lines.

from 1994 to 1998) as well as the placebo outcome analyzed above (Azeredo’s
vote share in 1994). The left-hand side panel in the figure demonstrates that,
conditioning on the prior economic and political characteristics of munici-
palities, those areas of Minas Gerais strongly dominated by SDCs bought in
the MM showed a more favorable evolution of support for the governor than
areas of the state dominated by SDCs who had not been bought off in the
scheme. In particular, a change in the level of electoral domination held by
bought SDCs from 0.01 to 0.78, the 5th and 95th percentiles of Ti , respec-
tively, is estimated to produce an increase in the over time change in vote
share for Azeredo from −0.18 to a little below −0.12. The 95% confidence
interval around the response function shows that the difference between
Brokered Politics in Brazil: An Empirical Analysis 297

the estimated ADRF for low levels of dominance and the estimated ADRF
for high levels of dominance is statistically significant. Indeed, a Wald test
reveals that the null hypothesis that µ(0.78) = µ(0.01) can be rejected at
the 99.9% confidence-level (p-value <0.001).
The right-hand side panel in the figure presents the dose–response func-
tion for the placebo outcome. If conditioning on the observed covariates
does an adequate job of removing confounding, then the function should be
approximately flat, demonstrating neither a clear increasing nor decreasing
tendency. As expected, one can draw a horizontal line from left to right that
is entirely contained within the confidence interval. In this case, the use of
a Wald test reveals that the null hypothesis that µ(0.78) = µ(0.01) cannot
be rejected at the 95% confidence-level (p-value = 0.07). In sum, analysis
of the impact of levels of dominance held by bought SDCs reinforces the
central conclusion of the paper that the practice of buying off local bosses
was effective in building electoral support for the incumbent governor.

6 Conclusion

Although it is clear that local brokers no longer play the outsize political
role once attributed to them in histories of fledgling democracies around
the world, the findings of this paper imply that they have retained more
influence than the standard approaches to voting behavior would give them
credit for. In turn of the millennium Minas Gerais, Brazil, I find that payoffs
to local brokers were able to generate an appreciable increase in electoral
support for the incumbent governor whose campaign nucleus made the pay-
ments to them. Although the bump in support due to these payoffs was
insufficient to secure victory for the governor, this was likely due to the
peculiarities of the election studied here, which include the fact that the gov-
ernor’s opponent was a former president who had secured the tacit support
of the governor’s own party leader (the sitting president). Had the campaign
began with a more balanced paying field, the payoffs to brokers may well
have been decisive.
Generally speaking, the magnitude of the estimated electoral returns to
brokerage is consistent with the notion that buying the loyalties of local
leaders is a relevant aspect of electoral strategy for state-level politicians in
Brazil. Although additional studies are needed to verify the extent to which
this is also true in other polities, the political and economic background
298 Gingerich

conditions in Minas Gerais are fairly representative of many political systems

at the middle income level. This suggests that brokerage may very well bear
electoral fruit elsewhere. Indeed, emerging research on the local electoral
influence of unionized teachers in Mexico is very much in keeping with the
findings in these pages (Larreguy et al., 2014).
Given these considerations, the present study should stimulate future
research into the electoral relevance of vote brokerage in democracies around
the world as well as an examination of the contexts under which institutional
change and socio-economic modernization does or does not spell its demise.
Based on the presently available evidence, however, the conclusion of this
work is clear: electoral middlemen really do matter.

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