The Workers' Party of Brazil (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) is one of the most important political parties to have come to power in Latin America's recent “left turn.” Founded in 1980 as a postcommunist and grassroots alternative to Brazil's personalistic, clientelistic, and unprogrammatic parties, the PT campaigned in opposition for 23 years before coming to power at the national level. The government of PT President Luíz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003–10) achieved remarkable reductions in economic inequality and poverty, and implemented an assertive foreign policy. It was succeeded in 2011 by another PT government led by Dilma Rousseff.

Wendy Hunter's new book asks how and why the PT changed between 1989, when it contested its first presidential election, and 2009, in the seventh year of the Lula presidency. Drawing on comparative party literature, Hunter describes this shift as one from a radical, grassroots, socialist party to a more moderate, “electoral-professional,” and social democratic one. She uses both rational choice theory and historical institutional analysis to explain the change. In her view, rational choice theory, with its emphasis on the importance of parties' external environment and the imperatives of strategic competition, helps account for the PT's move toward the center, as can be seen, for example, in its alliance with the Liberal Party (Partido Liberal) in the 2002 presidential election. Historical institutionalism, for its part, helps us understand why the PT's internal organization changed much less than did the tactics and discourse adopted in the electoral arena. In Hunter's words, “The dramatic changes that occurred on the external front coexisted with stickiness in the interior of the organization” (p. 179). This argument is made in the book's first two and last chapters.

The author examines the PT in three different arenas: municipal government, the lower house of the national Congress, and the presidency (Chapters 3–5). She argues that the PT retained more of its radicalism in Congress than it did at the municipal level, where it developed a pragmatic ability to administer local government. She also asserts that Lula's successive bids for the presidency (in 1989, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006) were a key factor in focusing the party on the goal of winning a majority of the votes in these elections, something it achieved in the second rounds in 2002 and 2006 (and again in 2010, when Rousseff won).

In Chapter 6, Hunter evaluates the Lula presidency in largely negative terms, labeling its macroeconomic policies as basically a continuation of the previous government's policies, its social policies as “conventional and unimaginative” (p. 152), land reform as “exceedingly modest” (p. 153) and a disappointment to social movements, and foreign policy as overly “politicized” (p. 159). In a section on executive-legislative relations, she ascribes the 2005–6 congressional vote-buying scandal (mensalão) to the reluctance of the PT to share cabinet positions with its coalition partners from other parties.

In the final chapter, Hunter compares the PT to four other leftist parties in Latin America: the Frente Amplio in Uruguay, the FREPASO in Argentina, La Causa Radical (LCR) in Venezuela, and the Izquierda Unida in Peru. She argues that the Frente Amplio and the PT possessed the right combination of a dominant popular leader and strong party organization, and therefore achieved electoral success. FREPASO and La Causa Radical made dramatic entrances onto the national political scene but could not sustain them due to weak party organization, whereas the Izquierda Unida was too rigid and sectarian as an organization to grow electorally. An appendix provides useful data on the PT's electoral record, vote intentions, the distribution of cabinet posts in the Lula administration and its predecessor, that of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the evolution of Brazilian party preferences.

The main argument of the book creatively synthesizes strategic with historical-institutional factors to account for the PT's transformation. However, there are some blind spots in the analysis. Despite her professed theoretical evenhandedness, Hunter seems more at home with rational choice than historical-institutional analysis. The obvious limitation of comparing the PT to a Downsian “vote-maximizing” firm competing for voters (consumers) in an electoral marketplace (as rational choice theory does) is not acknowledged. The PT has clearly changed from its origins as an umbrella for the representatives of various social movements (including the new trade unionism and Catholic liberation theology). But measuring its movement toward an ideal-typical “catch-all party” (synonymous with vote maximization in Hunter's analysis; see, for example, pp. 11, 13, 43, 106, and 135) probably downplays the party's enduring distinctiveness as well as its retention of a programmatic and organizational core. Similarly, in her comparison of the PT with the four other leftist parties in the final chapter, the focus is squarely on strategic factors and the “bottom line” of electoral success, as rational choice theory would have it, rather than on the historical, ideological, and programmatic variables often found in historical-institutional analysis.

Although the book is strong on the internal organization of the PT, it pays somewhat less attention to the importance of ideas, or more specifically the relevance of certain ideas at different historical moments, in the evolution of the PT. This could be due to the fact that Hunter's main journalistic sources are newspapers and magazines that are overtly hostile to the party, its ideology, and, sometimes, the class background of its leaders. In the footnotes I counted 61 citations from the Folha de São Paulo newspaper and 11 citations from the magazine Veja, which is a bit like citing the Washington Times and Fox News in a book on the Democratic Party in the United States. There are no citations of publications more sympathetic to the PT, such as Carta Capital or Caros Amigos, not to mention the PT's in-house journal Teoria e Debate (Theory and Debate).

The evaluation of the Lula presidency in Chapter 6 is surprisingly negative. It is hard to understand, on the basis of Hunter's review, how President Lula ended his two terms in office with an approval rating of about 80%. Furthermore, the evaluation seems short on detail. For example, she concludes that in the area of macroeconomic policy, the Lula government was committed to “continuing the policies of the Cardoso era” (p. 149), without any discussion of the “developmentalist” tendency of the second Lula term (2007–10). She dismisses the Lula government's land reform by claiming that it “redistributed less land … than the Cardoso government” (p. 153), despite official data to the contrary. Hunter further argues that “a key motivation behind Lula's Third World diplomacy was the PT's desire to satisfy its core supporters” (p. 159); that the PT could dominate foreign policymaking because it interfered in Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Relations, “which traditionally has tried to stay clear of internal politics” (p. 159); and that it ran “the most politicized foreign policy ever adopted by a Brazilian president” (p. 159, quoting José Albuquerque). The implication that foreign policy had not been “politicized” prior to the Lula administration is questionable. As in the discussion of other policies, this interpretation of foreign policy might be correct, but it would be more persuasive if it were based on more than the assertions of critics.

This book places the PT in the comparative party literature and offers clear and plausible explanations of some of the party's external and internal changes. It is somewhat stronger on the strategic, as opposed to the historical-institutional, dimension of the party's trajectory, and gives relatively little weight to the importance of political ideas. Its narrative is likely to please critics of the PT more than the party's supporters. Given the passions excited by the party and the intense divisions of Brazilian politics, it will probably not be the last word on the subject, but it offers a valuable and thorough overview of the rise of the Workers' Party in Brazil over a 20-year period