Governmental Centralization and Party Affiliation: Legislator Strategies in Brazil and Japan

Abstract

What shapes politicians' strategies in political systems where pork, rather than programmatic platforms, wins elections? We argue that resource control provides much of the answer, as politics in pork-centric systems will in large part be organized around actors who control access to pork. We use new national and subnational data from Brazil and Japan to show how the degree of centralization of resources can affect party affiliation patterns. We find that in decentralized Brazil, both national and subnational politicians join parties that control their subnational government. In contrast, in our analysis of centralized Japan, politicians at both national and subnational levels base their party affiliation decisions on national-level partisan considerations.