The partisan placement of policy makers offers a good basic indicator of left/right sources of commitment, with policy makers on the left being more committed to equity than those on the right and significant variation existing within these broad categories—variation explored in the case studies. I use the model for ideological party scores developed by Coppedge (1997) and extended by Huber, et al (2012), using the Power and Zucco 2012 Brazilian legislative coding as a reliability check. Tables A.3 and A.4 list the political parties of the regional executive across the time period in each country, with their scoring and a brief description. Coppedge’s coding scheme—based on expert surveys—permits parties and coalitions to be coded as left (L), center left (CL), center (C), center right (CR), and right (R). Then, these parties can either be secular (S) or Christian (X). Parties may also be coded as personalist (P), independent (I), or unknown (U). Coppedge codes the Brazilian parties and coalitions and in the case of Spain I extend his coding model and verify its reliability based on the results of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (Bakker, et al 2012).
In Spain I score left and center left parties 1 and all others 0 because no centrist parties have governed. While I do not argue that there are no differences between left and center left parties, the narrower the categories become, the more likely there will be significant discrepancies among experts regarding coding. If broad differences are robust in statistical analysis, this is a more conservative test than if particular parties are cherry-picked. While the regional affiliates of the major central parties differ in both countries, they do not differ across the 1/0 divide, which facilitates comparison
at the regional level.
In Spain, the Partido Socialista Obrero Espa˜nol (PSOE, Spanish Socialist Work- ers’ Party coded SCL) and the Euro-communist coalitionIzquierda Unida (IU, United Left coded SL) are considered left parties, as well as a host of regional and minority nationalist parties. There are very few parties in Spain where left/right partisanship is not easy to discern reliably. There are no parties that have switched from left to right over the course of the democratic period.
In Brazil, weak programmaticness of parties may call into question the ability to reliably code parties as left or right. Yet left parties in Brazil have tended to be the most disciplined and programmatic (Kitschelt and Kselman 2011; Chapman Osterkatz 2012). In addition, the coding process for both Coppedge and Huber, et al takes into account actual policy effort rather than just party platform. Therefore, there are only five relevant parties coded as left or center left in post-1988 Brazil and we can be fairly confident of the use of the label. These parties are the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party coded SL), the Partido Socialista Brasileiro
(PSB, Brasilian Socialist Party coded SL), the Partido Comunista Brasileira (PCB, Brazilian Communist Party, which became the PPS—Partido Popular Socialista— in 1992 and is coded SL), the Partido Democr´atico Trabalhista (PDT, Democratic Workers’ Party coded SCL), and thePartido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Brazilian Social Democratic Party coded SCL until 1994).
The one case where I modify the Coppedge coding is in the case of the PSDB, a case that is problematic for Huber and Stephens for the same reasons (2012: 125). The PSDB coalition that governed federally in 1994 included a hard right and a center right party (the PFL and the PTB) and the PSDB victory would have been impossible without their support. The coalition was highly criticized because of the PFL’s affiliation with the dictatorship and cemented a shift to the right for the
PSDB, which could not compete with the increasingly popular PT on the left and has continued drifting to the right in opposition. In the Power and Zucco survey of legislators, the PSDB was to the left of the PMDB in 1990 and 1993, yet by the 1997 survey registered a significant rightward shift, now to the right of the PMDB, and has moved steadily rightward in each successive survey wave (2012: 9).
Yet as we shall see in the case studies, the PSDB at the center from 1995-2002 not only increased the capacity of the central state by stabilizing the economy, but began implementing modest social reforms and even redistributed a significant amount of land. At the subnational level, many of the states that pioneered equity-enhancing health reforms were governed by the PSDB1. While the PSDB is commonly referred to as a neoliberal party, the fiscal responsibility and market-conforming macroeconomic policies put in place under Cardoso did not adhere to the orthodoxy of the IMF at the time. Equity-enhancing social policies must be sustainable to be consolidated and the macroeconomic position of the PSDB from 1994-2002 was not radically different from that of traditional nordic social democracy. Its lack of emphasis on social questions is primarily where the party loses its claim to the center left.
I therefore code the PSDB as center left until 1994, but then give the center and state affiliates a .5, after2. This shift is defensible precisely because the PSDB position in 1994 was so unpopular among actors on the center left. In Maranh˜ao and Bahia, where the PFL represented the old guard and the PSDB was a bitter opponent of oligarchic rule, state party affiliates refused to sign on to the central electoral coalition. The cost to unhappy PSDB politicians of joining other parties was fairly low, as only the PT presented barriers to party membership. Politicians
1Though in nearly all cases this was prior to 1994, a period over which there is little disagreement
about the coding.
2I test the models with various specifications for the PSDB and report the differences in the
uncomfortable with the shift could choose alternative affiliations, and many did. Cumulative left variables can capture processes of increasing-returns. However, such measures are too highly correlated with democracy and economic development in these countries. I therefore use a ten-year moving average that bounds left control of the executive between 0 and 1, yet allows the effect to persist over time, as well as more realistically modeling the early years of new left governments—where inevitably previous policy legacies cannot be changed overnight. In Spain I code all members of the AC cabinet because the system is parliamentary, whereas in Brazil I code only the Governor because the running mate is chosen prior to the election and the cabinet is named independent of the state assembly. Figures A.7 and A.8 show the trajectory of partisanship over time in each country, by AC or state, and without the modification of the PSDB after 1994.