David Samuels
Biographic Data
| ID | 105012 |
|---|---|
| NAME | David Samuels |
| GIVEN NAMES | David |
| FAMILY NAME | Samuels |
| SIGNATURE | SAMUELS D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5481-8217 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1862 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 76 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 24 |
The Green Revolution is not always bloodless
Partisan Dehumanization in Brazil's Asymmetrically Polarized Party System
An ugly manifestation of polarization is partisan dehumanization, a form of moral disengagement from and support for aggressive or even violent treatment of one's opponents. Brazil offers a useful case to explore the relative importance of in-group sympathy or out-group antipathy as sources of dehumanization, since its voters are polarized between supporters and opponents of a single party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT). Usin…
Partisan Stereotyping and Polarization in Brazil
In recent decades, Brazilian voters have grown polarized between supporters of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT), known as petistas, and its opponents, known as antipetistas. What explains this animosity? One potential source of polarization is partisan stereotyping, a tendency for partisans to misperceive the social composition of both their own side's bases of support as well as their opponents'. We show that most Brazilians ov…
Rez Metal
The International Context of Democratic Backsliding
We know much about “how democracies die”: elites and masses become polarized, and norms of mutual toleration, forbearance, and institutional restraint erode. But why do elites feel free to undermine these guardrails of democracy? What are the sources of backsliding? Answers to these questions have focused on the impact of economic and cultural change, and on autocratic meddling. I consider another potential source of backsliding around the world:…
Democracy, rural inequality, and education spending
Desk Rejecting
Journal editing has become an increasingly challenging business in the past decade
New Medium, Same Story? Gender Gaps in Book Publishing
Recent research points to a gender gap in journal-article authorship: women are underrepresented. Given that publishing a book remains central to many political scientists’ careers, this article explores the extent to which gender publication and citation gaps also exist for books. We find that although the gender publication gap for university-press books has narrowed over time, it remains larger than for journal articles. We also find that book…
Lord, Peasant … and Tractor? Agricultural Mechanization, Moore’s Thesis, and the Emergence of Democracy
Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners have historically repressed agricultural workers and sustained autocracy. What might change landowning elites’ preferences for dictatorship and reduce their opposition to democracy? Change requires reducing landowners’ need to maintain political control over labor. This transition occurs when mecha…
Gender Gaps in Perceptions of Political Science Journals
The gender publication gap puts women at a disadvantage for tenure and promotion, which contributes to the discipline’s leaky pipeline. Several studies published in PS find no evidence of gender bias in the review process and instead suggest that submission pools are distorted by gender. To make a contribution to this important debate, we fielded an original survey to a sample of American Political Science Association members to measure participa…
Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans
Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship has little impact on voter behavior in Brazil; what matters most is pork-barreling, incumbent performance, and candidates' charisma. This book shows that soon after redemocratization in the 1980s, over half of Brazilian voters expressed either a strong affinity or antipathy for or against a particular political party. In particular, that the contours of positive and negative partisanship in Brazil ha…
Beyond the Gender Citation Gap
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The Benefits and Pitfalls of Google Scholar
Google Scholar (GS) is an important tool that faculty, administrators, and external reviewers use to evaluate the scholarly impact of candidates for jobs, tenure, and promotion. This article highlights both the benefits of GS—including the reliability and consistency of its citation counts and its platform for disseminating scholarship and facilitating networking—and its pitfalls. GS has biases because citation is a social and political process t…
Gender and Editorial Outcomes at Comparative Political Studies
Introduction to Gender in the Journals, Continued
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Response to Isabela Mares’s review of Inequality and Democratization
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Journal Editors and “Results-Free” Research
Should journals review submissions based only on the research question and research design, independent of whether the results are statistically and substantively significant? This special issue is the first effort in political science (and perhaps across the social sciences) to publish articles based on submission of research designs alone. We offer our thoughts on the process
Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots
What are the sources of mass partisanship? The focus of this article is on the role of party organizational strategies in Brazil, where sociological cleavages are weak. All Brazilian parties post electoral gains by opening local branch offices, but only the Workers’ Party (PT) manages to win voters’ hearts and minds, cultivating mass partisan identification. This follows from its deliberate effort to use its local party organization to reach out …
Music, Sound and Space
Book Review| September 01 2015 Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience. Georgina Born, ed. 2013. xv, 358 pp., figures, tables, music examples, bibliography, index. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cloth, $104.99. David Samuels David Samuels Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ethnomusicology (2015) 59 (3): 499–502…
Inequality and Democratization
Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth - equal or unequal - shape regime change. This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality. Contrary to most mainstream arguments,…
The Impact of Participatory Democracy
Party “capacity” in new democracies
Scholars and practitioners express concern that parties in "third wave" democracies are poorly developed, compared to parties in older democracies. We suggest that parties vary in their organizational "capacity", focusing on parties' ability to select trustworthy executive agents. Capacity is higher where parties can vet potential executive talent by observing future leaders over time in the legislature – an increasingly available option as democ…
The Power of Partisanship in Brazil
To what extent do party labels influence individuals’ policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the United States, where party identification can generate both in‐group and out‐group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented …
Lulismo, Petismo, and the Future of Brazilian Politics
What is the source of the Partido dos Trabalhadores’ (PT) success? And is the PT likely to thrive into the future as a key player in Brazil's party system? In this paper we weigh in on an emerging debate about Lula's role in the PT's rise to power. Without Lula's ability to win more votes than his party, we might not be discussing lulismo at all, much less its difference from petismo. Yet despite Lula's fame, fortune, and extraordinary political …
Case studies in comparative politics
Voting in Open Economies
What are the electoral consequences of global market integration? Although recent discussions of politics and markets have much to say on globalization’s implications for policy outcomes, the impact of market integration on representative democracy has received scant attention. This article addresses this omission. We extend the globalization literature to develop two competing hypotheses regarding the influence of open economies on electoral acc…
The Value of a Vote
Comparative studies of electoral institutions have largely neglected a fundamental characteristic of most of the world's electoral systems: malapportionment. This article provides a method for measuring malapportionment in different types of electoral systems, calculates levels of malapportionment in seventy-eight countries, and employs statistical analysis to explore the correlates of malapportionment in both upper and lower chambers. The analys…
Electoral Accountability and the Variety of Democratic Regimes
Do voters reward or punish incumbents for retrospective performance similarly in different democratic regimes? Despite debates on the merits of different regimes, little research has investigated the implications of constitutional design on voters' ability to hold politicians to account. This article shows that regime type determines the way and extent to which elections enable voters to reward or sanction incumbents. These regime effects are sep…
Pork Barreling Is Not Credit Claiming or Advertising
Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for "bringing home the bacon," I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer is that deputies do not trade pork for votes, they tr…
Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems
A prominent question in comparative electoral studies concerns the so-called personal vote. Typically, scholars approach this question at a cross-national as opposed to a cross-party level. In this article, in contrast, the author focuses on the characteristics of parties, as opposed to the characteristics of electoral systems, as determinants of candidates' personal vote seeking. The author argues that a candidate's adoption of an individualisti…
Presidentialism and Accountability for the Economy in Comparative Perspective
To what extent do the institutions of presidentialism allow voters to hold governments accountable? Powell and Whitten (1993) suggested that voter capacity to sanction is strong when "clarity of government responsibility" for outcomes is clear, and vice versa. I argue that clarity of responsibility functions differently under presidentialism and that presidentialism generates particular forms of accountability. In general, electoral sanctioning i…
The Power of Partisanship in Brazil
To what extent do party labels influence individuals’ policy positions? Much research has examined this question in the United States, where party identification can generate both in‐group and out‐group pressures to conform to a party's position. However, relatively little research has considered the question's comparative generalizability. We explore the impact of party labels on attitudes in Brazil, a relatively new democracy with a fragmented …
Inequality and Democratization
Scholars continue to grapple with the question of the relationship between economic development and democratization; prominent recent research has focused on the effects of economic inequality. Boix suggests that democratization is likelier when inequality is low, whereas Acemoglu and Robinson argue that democratization is likelier when inequality is at middling levels. Both assume that democratization is a function of autocratic elites’ fear of …
The Gubernatorial Coattails Effect
Competition for executive-level offices can influence competition for legislative office, and federal institutions can provide an "opportunity structure" that shapes partisan competition. In Brazil, unlike in systems where the presidential election might drive congressional elections, electoral incentives are state-centered. Candidates for Congress focus on the gubernatorial race, not the presidential race. Specifically, the effective number of c…
From Socialism to Social Democracy
Luis Inácio Lula da Silva’s victory in Brazil’s 2002 presidential election brought to power Latin America’s largest leftist party, the Workers’Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores [PT]). The PTwon because it moved to the center, and voters regarded this shift as credible. The party’s transformation is puzzling, because political scientists do not expect strategic flexibility in “mass bureaucratic” parties, which the PT resembles. Although exogenous f…
Incumbents and Challengers on a Level Playing Field
This article assesses the impact of campaign spending on incumbent and challenger vote shares in elections to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. I argue that incumbents and challengers gain equally from campaign spending. This contrasts with the prominent argument about U.S. House elections that incumbents gain little from spending while challengers gain a great deal. In the U.S., incumbents gain little because being in office generates significa…
Ambition and Competition
Despite Brazil's electoral laws, which would appear to encourage incumbency, legislative turnover in Brazil consistently exceeds 50% with each election. In this article, I explain this phenomenon as a function of two factors: the nature of political ambition and the dynamics of electoral competition. Political ambition accounts for about half of the turnover because a sizeable portion of incumbent legislators decides to run for nonlegislative off…
Presidentialized Parties
Scholars have devoted substantial research to political parties, but comparativists have not explored how presidentialism and parliamentarism differently affect party development, organization, and behavior. The parties' literature developed from explorations of European parliamentary systems, in which constitutional structure is not an independent variable, or from the U.S. case, in which the presidentialism is sometimes not related to party dev…
Federalism and Democratic Transitions
Although federalism is a potentially important variable in democratization, few studies explore its impact in democratic transitions and consolidation. Scholars generally agree that federalism is quite strong in contemporary Brazil. This study examines how and why strong federalism reemerged in Brazil following twenty years of centralizing military rule. In brief, the 1964–1985 military regime tried but failed to transform the state-based organiz…
Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America
When the Spanish invaded the Inca empire in 1532, the cult of the ancestors was an essential feature of pre-Columbian religion throughout the Andes. The dead influenced politics, protected the living, symbolized the past, and legitimized claims over the land their descendants occupied, while the living honored the presence of the dead in numerous aspects of daily life. A central purpose of the Spanish missionary endeavor was to suppress the Andea…
Concurrent Elections, Discordant Results
Stumping for candidates is a thing of the past, it's a figure of speech. These days, if you advertise that you're going to vote for this or that candidate, it doesn't change anything. So Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso expressed his belief that his support would not help elect candidates for other offices in O Estado de Sao Paulo, August 3, 1998. In January 1999 Cardoso became the first Brazilian president to pass the presidential s…
The Impact of Participatory Democracy
Sources of Mass Partisanship in Brazil
Scholars believe that mass partisanship in Brazil is comparatively weak. Using evidence from a 2002 national survey, however, this study finds that the aggregate level of party identification actually falls only slightly below the world average and exceeds levels found in many newer democracies. Yet this finding is misleading, because the distribution of partisanship is skewed toward only one party, the PT. This trend results from a combination o…
On the Absence of Centripetal Incentives in Double-Member Districts
In its final months, the Pinochet regime engineered a number of institutional reforms with the intent of bolstering the right side of the spectrum and of promoting centripetal political competition once democratic procedures were reinitiated in 1989. One of the most important reforms created 60 double-member districts for elections to the lower house. Although some analysts have claimed that the new system does in fact promote centrist position t…
Crafting Mass Partisanship at the Grass Roots
What are the sources of mass partisanship? The focus of this article is on the role of party organizational strategies in Brazil, where sociological cleavages are weak. All Brazilian parties post electoral gains by opening local branch offices, but only the Workers’ Party (PT) manages to win voters’ hearts and minds, cultivating mass partisan identification. This follows from its deliberate effort to use its local party organization to reach out …
Determinantes do Voto Partidário em Sistemas Eleitorais Centrados no Candidato
A prominent question in recent comparative work is when will the personal vote matter? Typically, scholars approach this question at a cross-national as opposed to a cross-party level: that is, they highlight features of national electoral systems that create incentives for individual politicians to pursue a personal (or a party) vote, rather than highlighting features of parties that might predispose candidates in those parties to pursue persona…
Does Money Matter? Credible Commitments and Campaign Finance in New Democracies
How important is money to the electoral process? With the spread of competitive elections around the world in the last twenty-five years this question is increasingly important in comparative politics. Yet, despite the potentially critical role of campaign finance, research on it remains confined largely to the U.S. Surprisingly few studies explore campaign finance comparatively, and fewer still explore campaign funds in new democracies.1 No stud…
Money, Elections, and Democracy in Brazil
Brazil's 1993 law requiring candidates to report their campaign contributions has generated a new source of data to explore the supposition that Brazilian elections are extraordinarily expensive. An examination of these data from Brazil's 1994 and 1998 general elections reveals that most money for Brazilian electoral campaigns comes from business sources and that leftist candidates have extremely limited access to such financing. The effect on de…
Devaluing the Vote in Latin America
Malapportionment poses a serious, yet hitherto neglected, challenge to the quality and fairness of democracy in many Latin American countries
Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames
In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speec…
These Are the Stories That the Dogs Tell
Determinantes do Voto Partidário em Sistemas Eleitorais Centrados no Candidato
A prominent question in recent comparative work is when will the personal vote matter? Typically, scholars approach this question at a cross-national as opposed to a cross-party level: that is, they highlight features of national electoral systems that create incentives for individual politicians to pursue a personal (or a party) vote, rather than highlighting features of parties that might predispose candidates in those parties to pursue persona…
A nova política dos governadores
Este artigo analisa o incremento do poder dos governadores e o ressurgimento dos interesses políticos estaduais como determinantes do comportamento dos congressistas durante a transição democrática. Para isso, os autores explicam como os governos militares fracassaram em reduzir a influência das redes políticas estaduais sobre a classe política e como os governadores remergiram e tornaram-se atores fundamentais para derrubar o regime autoritário.…
On the Absence of Centripetal Incentives in Double-Member Districts
In its final months, the Pinochet regime engineered a number of institutional reforms with the intent of bolstering the right side of the spectrum and of promoting centripetal political competition once democratic procedures were reinitiated in 1989. One of the most important reforms created 60 double-member districts for elections to the lower house. Although some analysts have claimed that the new system does in fact promote centrist position t…
Incentives to Cultivate a Party Vote in Candidate-centric Electoral Systems
A prominent question in comparative electoral studies concerns the so-called personal vote. Typically, scholars approach this question at a cross-national as opposed to a cross-party level. In this article, in contrast, the author focuses on the characteristics of parties, as opposed to the characteristics of electoral systems, as determinants of candidates' personal vote seeking. The author argues that a candidate's adoption of an individualisti…
The Whole and the Sum of the Parts, or, How Cookie and the Cupcakes Told the Story of Apache History in San Carlos
On the San Carlos Apache Reservation in southeastern Arizona, popular music circulates as a means of constructing statements of indigenous Apache identity in the community. The sense of Apache identity depends at least as much on engagement with, and revoicing of, "dominant" cultural expressions as it does on the persistence of the traditional forms associated with cultural heritage. In this article I trace out some of the aesthetic tropes that r…
The Gubernatorial Coattails Effect
Competition for executive-level offices can influence competition for legislative office, and federal institutions can provide an "opportunity structure" that shapes partisan competition. In Brazil, unlike in systems where the presidential election might drive congressional elections, electoral incentives are state-centered. Candidates for Congress focus on the gubernatorial race, not the presidential race. Specifically, the effective number of c…
Federalism and Democratic Transitions
Although federalism is a potentially important variable in democratization, few studies explore its impact in democratic transitions and consolidation. Scholars generally agree that federalism is quite strong in contemporary Brazil. This study examines how and why strong federalism reemerged in Brazil following twenty years of centralizing military rule. In brief, the 1964–1985 military regime tried but failed to transform the state-based organiz…
Ambition and Competition
Despite Brazil's electoral laws, which would appear to encourage incumbency, legislative turnover in Brazil consistently exceeds 50% with each election. In this article, I explain this phenomenon as a function of two factors: the nature of political ambition and the dynamics of electoral competition. Political ambition accounts for about half of the turnover because a sizeable portion of incumbent legislators decides to run for nonlegislative off…
Concurrent Elections, Discordant Results
Stumping for candidates is a thing of the past, it's a figure of speech. These days, if you advertise that you're going to vote for this or that candidate, it doesn't change anything. So Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso expressed his belief that his support would not help elect candidates for other offices in O Estado de Sao Paulo, August 3, 1998. In January 1999 Cardoso became the first Brazilian president to pass the presidential s…
Incumbents and Challengers on a Level Playing Field
This article assesses the impact of campaign spending on incumbent and challenger vote shares in elections to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. I argue that incumbents and challengers gain equally from campaign spending. This contrasts with the prominent argument about U.S. House elections that incumbents gain little from spending while challengers gain a great deal. In the U.S., incumbents gain little because being in office generates significa…
When Does Every Penny Count
Scholars generally believe that as inter-party competition intensifies, candidates and parties will need to spend more money to win votes. Cox and Thies (1998) extended this claim and argued that in electoral systems that require intra- as well as inter-party competition we also ought to observe a positive relationship between the intensity of intra-party competition and the level of individual campaign spending. They demonstrated such an effect …
Devaluing the Vote in Latin America
Malapportionment poses a serious, yet hitherto neglected, challenge to the quality and fairness of democracy in many Latin American countries
Does Money Matter? Credible Commitments and Campaign Finance in New Democracies
How important is money to the electoral process? With the spread of competitive elections around the world in the last twenty-five years this question is increasingly important in comparative politics. Yet, despite the potentially critical role of campaign finance, research on it remains confined largely to the U.S. Surprisingly few studies explore campaign finance comparatively, and fewer still explore campaign funds in new democracies.1 No stud…
The Value of a Vote
Comparative studies of electoral institutions have largely neglected a fundamental characteristic of most of the world's electoral systems: malapportionment. This article provides a method for measuring malapportionment in different types of electoral systems, calculates levels of malapportionment in seventy-eight countries, and employs statistical analysis to explore the correlates of malapportionment in both upper and lower chambers. The analys…
Money, Elections, and Democracy in Brazil
Brazil's 1993 law requiring candidates to report their campaign contributions has generated a new source of data to explore the supposition that Brazilian elections are extraordinarily expensive. An examination of these data from Brazil's 1994 and 1998 general elections reveals that most money for Brazilian electoral campaigns comes from business sources and that leftist candidates have extremely limited access to such financing. The effect on de…
Materialism and Modern Lyric
Daniel Tiffany. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. + 351 pp
Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames
In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speec…
Pork Barreling Is Not Credit Claiming or Advertising
Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for "bringing home the bacon," I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer is that deputies do not trade pork for votes, they tr…
Presidentialized Parties
Scholars have devoted substantial research to political parties, but comparativists have not explored how presidentialism and parliamentarism differently affect party development, organization, and behavior. The parties' literature developed from explorations of European parliamentary systems, in which constitutional structure is not an independent variable, or from the U.S. case, in which the presidentialism is sometimes not related to party dev…
The Power of Kiowa Song
The Power of Kiowa Song:. Collaborative Ethnography. Luke E. Lassiter. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998. ix. 266 pp., illustrations, tables, photographs, appendixes, notes, references, index
Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil
Ambition theory suggests that scholars can understand a good deal about politics by exploring politicians' career goals. In the USA, an enormous literature explains congressional politics by assuming that politicians primarily desire to win re-election. In contrast, although Brazil's institutions appear to encourage incumbency, politicians do not seek to build a career within the legislature. Instead, political ambition focuses on the subnational…
Presidentialism, Elections and Representation
How does presidentialism affect various forms of representation? All else being equal, presidentialism is likely to impede the prospects for ‘mandate’ representation but enhance the prospects for ‘accountability’ representation. The degree of mandate or accountability representation is a function of the balance of powers and the degree of separation of purpose between the branches. Strong presidentialism works against mandate representation by fr…
Ambition, Federalism, and Legislative Politics in Brazil
A economia política da reforma macroeconômica no Brasil, 1995-2002
This article examines the successes and limits of the macroeconomic and fiscal reforms under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso Administration in Brazil. The author begins by studying factors that contributed to macroeconomic difficulties prior to 1995, then proceeds to examine how the Real Plan enabled the Cardoso Administration to control interference by State Governors in the national economy. The article then describes how former President Cardoso…
Political science (59 works) · Law (52 works) · Politics (47 works) · Law (35 works) · Sociology (33 works) · Economics (27 works) · Political economy (27 works) · Politics and Society in Latin America (26 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (22 works) · Democracy (21 works)