Response to Isabela Mares’s review of Inequality and Democratization: An Elite-Competition Approach

• Published in: Perspectives on politics 2017-06, Vol.15 (2), p.565-566
• Main Authors: Ansell, Ben W., Samuels, David J.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Changes; Competition; Critical Dialogues; Democratization; Elites; Expropriation; Incentives; Inequality; Political science; Politics; Risk reduction; Rural communities; Taxation
• ISSN: 1537-5927; 1541-0986
• DOI: 10.1017/S1537592717000494

Mares recommends that our own work might be improved by deeper engagement with specific country cases and subnational data, along the lines of her own work. We agree that these types of extensions would have added an interesting dimension to our book, and we thought a great deal about adding such sections during the completion of the manuscript. Ultimately, we chose not to go down that path, reasoning that it is not obvious that micro and macro analyses of regime change cleanly reduce into one another. At its core, our book is interested in struggles--largely among elites--at the national level over control of the state. These actors' strength depends on the source and growth of their income--whether they are in a declining rural sector or a rising industrial sector, for example. Their ability to prevail in a political struggle depends on the balance of material fortune among elites, again at the national level. In turn, with the desire to control the state comes incentives to reduce or increase national levels of taxes or the prevailing risk of expropriation. In all cases, actors and incentives are defined at the country level.