In the last two decades governments across Latin America have adopted and implemented conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs, lifting large numbers of poor families out of economic destitution and inducing child beneficiaries to attend school and receive preventive health care on a regular basis. First emerging in Mexico and Brazil, this social policy innovation was quickly adopted in a wide range of other countries in the region. This chapter employs the analytical framework of diffusion to examine and analyze the spatial and temporal clustering that characterized the spread of CCTs in Latin America. Distinguishing between the adoption of the new policy innovation and its implementation, the chapter argues that diffusion dynamics were crucial in the adoption phase. It leverages a diffusion framework to explain why so many countries adopted CCTs at all. At the same time, the chapter grants that many other factors influenced how CCTs unfolded during the implementation phase, shaping the varied forms they have taken across the region.

The PT is a case of the successful and fairly gradual transformation of a radical institutionalized mass party into a more electorally competitive professional party. Given its start as exceptionally ideological and grassroots oriented, it was the kind of party we might least expect to have reoriented in a vote-maximizing way. Ultimately, the PT did adapt but its adaptation was fairly slow – arguably slower than, for example, the Argentine Peronists, the Chilean Socialists, or the Argentine FREPASO. After three failed presidential bids, the PT went on to win two consecutive presidential contests, an unprecedented feat for the left in Brazil. Although Lula had responded rationally to externally induced incentives (and persuaded significant elements in the party to go along with him), there was also internal resistance to change. The PT's origins and structure created lags and distortions in adaptation but also some real advantages, namely endowing the party with credibility as the voice of opposition in 2002, discipline in passing difficult reforms once Lula became president, and a reliable foundation that would help it weather a number of serious crises.

In this chapter I return to the analytical approaches that frame the book. I draw out the broader theoretical implications of the book's analysis after first revisiting the reasons for change within the PT and comparing anew the features of its adaptation that are explained by a strategic framework to those that historical institutionalism helps to understand.

Events of the late twentieth century put leftist parties in a bind all over Latin America. This was true for Brazil as well. While the international socialist referent lost ground symbolically, economic developments in the very countries where left parties had gained traction forced them into a difficult position. Trade opening, privatization, and the reform and restructuring of the state – backed in considerable measure by key domestic elites, international financial institutions, and public opinion itself – required such parties to adapt in order to survive politically. Successful adaptation generally entails changes in strategy and organization that improve a party's ability to gain and keep electoral office amidst changing environmental challenges. The specific changes required depend on the given context, but in general they involve orienting the party away from the preferences of militants and more toward those of large groups of voters. These changes must find support within the party and the electorate.

To help us understand and assess adaptations within the PT, this chapter presents two broad analytical frameworks – rational choice and historical institutionalism – that offer different insights and perspectives on the issue of change, and it examines several studies on political parties that draw on these frameworks in key ways. Against this backdrop, the chapter examines and analyzes the distinctiveness of the PT as a mass left party prior to the mid-1990s, and it explains how and why it became a more electoral-professional and catchall party in the decade thereafter.

On January 1, 2003 Lula assumed office. Leftist circles in Brazil and abroad rejoiced over this long-awaited event. Nevertheless, remaining tensions – the radicalism of some PT factions on the one hand and Lula's efforts at moderation on the other – raised the question of which direction his government would take. Would the PT stand by its core programmatic ideals and historic principles or adapt to the constraints of the global economy and the institutionally derived incentives of Brazilian politics? Would it carry out the party's vision of redistributive state-led economic development, progressive social policy, and ethical government or would it conform in wholesale fashion to contemporary economic trends and the structure of Brazilian politics? With respect to these questions, many wondered whether Lula would be able to control the radicals inside the PT. Just as external economic and political constraints had eroded some of the PT's distinctiveness in the opposition, would the process of adaptation be furthered with the PT in government? How would the PT, as well as its relationship to Lula and his government, change as a result of government decisions? This chapter contends that the experience of government made it even more difficult to retain the norms, commitments, and policy orientations of the past and therefore contributed crucially to the PT's normalization.