From Dictatorship to the Brazilian New Republic in Crisis: Understanding Lula's Political Leadership.

A Biographical Study of Political Leadership Margaret Keck describes I Lula and His Politics of Cunning i as "about Lula as a leader and not about the party he led." Lula's reputation as one of the world's most successful politicians - the Pelé of worldwide presidential electoral politics - comes from eight successive elections since 1989 in which either Lula or his chosen PT candidate won or placed second, including four in a row won between 2002 and 2014. Political biography is said to be "the disciplinary poor relation to the study of political science more generally", and few would agree that, without biography, the discipline risks being "'a form of taxidermy" (Arklay 2006, 17, 15). Even in 2002, as Keck correctly observes, Lula may have insisted that his campaign be "freed from the strictures of party control", but it was "still built on party foundations.". [Extracted from the article]