). In such cases, parties can depend on community organizers, ethnic chiefs, local bureaucrats, neighborhood leaders, patrons, caciques, local politicians, and other notables to act as brokers and close the gulf between party politicians and voters.Brokers, however, can be disloyal, acting more as free agents in a market with a bloc of voters to "sell" than as committed activists. From the perspective of the party, these brokers are useful because they control a private constituency or a module of nonpartisan voters who can readily help party candidates win elections. However, when multiple parties need brokerage to win elections, only the one offering the most attractive incentive package will gain the support of a broker. Since parties' relative ability to hire brokers may fluctuate over time, ongoing brokerage deals may suddenly break apart as brokers receive counteroffers and decide to place their modules elsewhere. Hence, these modular parties need brokers to mobilize voters, but broker disloyalty makes them fragile.This article identifies how brokers' disloyalty affects the organization and the electoral performance of political parties through an empirical analysis of Brazil. The research design in this article takes advantage of the fact that Brazilian parties use local politicians, especially mayoral candidates, as agents for their congressional candidates, making the measurement of broker affiliation less elusive. In addition, the article employs an empirical strategy that counters the endogeneity problem that weak electoral support stimulates disloyalty, or in the case of mayoral candidates, party switching (Desposato 2006). In 2007, a Supreme Court decision greatly inhibited party switching. This decision by an independent actor increased exit costs for those brokers who had won mayoral elections and would then have to ponder whether party switching was worth losing the mayoral seat. Thus, the court increased the survival odds of some party-broker relations.

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Why do incumbents enjoy an electoral advantage in some political settings but suffer from a disadvantage in others? We propose a novel explanation linking variation in incumbency effects with exogenous commodity shocks. While voters attempt to sanction incumbents for economic performance, changes in commodity prices affect their evaluations and condition the electoral fortunes of incumbents vis-à-vis challengers. We test our argument in Brazilian municipalities, combining a plausibly exogenous measure of variation in commodity prices with a close election regression discontinuity design. Our results show that increases in the price of agricultural commodities greatly enhance the prospects of incumbents, while negative shocks exacerbate their incumbency disadvantage, especially in rural municipalities. Further investigation suggests that commodity shocks do not operate via voter learning about candidate quality, changes in the pool of candidates, shifts in voter preferences, or strategic elite investments. Instead, we find suggestive evidence that commodity shocks affect voters' evaluations through their effect on local economic growth.

We investigate how dominant media networks can manipulate voters in young democracies. During the first presidential election after the democratic transition in Brazil, TV Globo, the largest and most-watched network in the country, unexpectedly manipulated the news coverage of the last debate 2 days before the decisive second round. In a video segment, Globo unfavorably depicted the left-wing candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Using the geographical distribution of broadcaster-specific TV signals and the timing of election events, we identify the effect of the manipulation net of the effect of the debate itself, showing that Globo’s misleading reporting caused Lula to lose millions of votes. Our results showcase how the media can reshape an election in a single stroke, especially where the media is concentrated and politically inexperienced voters have few other sources of information.

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The effect of reelection intention on public health expenditures: An analysis based on reputation models. The political model of reputational-building argues that if the incumbent politician aspires to be reassigned, he/she must act in the voters' interest to obtain their approval and consequently their votes. Considering that voters are sensitive to public health expenditures, we check how reputational incentives shift municipal spending patterns in electoral years. The empirical tests for 3.004 Brazilian municipalities show an increase of health expenditures in those cities in which incumbents are trying to maintain their jobs. In addition, we find an increment in health expenditures where mayors forfeit their chance of being reelected to the benefit of a party mate.

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