Scholarship is a collective enterprise. This allows younger generations to push the envelope by standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants, and it means that there is room for scholars to make very different—but ultimately complementary—contributions. The decision to pair my book, Conservative Party-Building in Latin America, with Carew Boulding and Claudio A. Holzner’s Voice and Inequality in this Critical Dialogue was an inspired one. The former focuses on the classic vehicle of democratic participation (political parties); the latter highlights the importance of a frequently overlooked one (contacting government officials). The former focuses on what is often thought of as the quintessential political instrument of the wealthy (conservative parties); the latter focuses on people at the opposite end of the income distribution (the poor). The former is a small-N, fieldwork-based study; the latter is a large-N, survey-based one.
I am very grateful to Boulding and Holzner for their generous and insightful review of my book. It was especially gratifying to note the points of contact between our very different books. One such point they highlight is the tendency of many poor people in Latin America to vote for center-right parties. This has, in fact, been true wherever such parties have thrived. British workers in the late nineteenth century, for example, were famously likened by Conservative visionaries such as Benjamin Disraeli to “angels in marble”—a Tory electorate just waiting to be released. Whether we agree with them or not, the decision of some poor people to vote for conservative parties cannot be written off as the product of false consciousness. They have their reasons. In their book, Boulding and Holzner observe that clientelism, for example, is not always a bad deal for the clients. In my book, I highlight other reasons—including, as normatively discomfiting as I personally find it to be, retrospective voting based on the achievements of past authoritarian regimes.
Boulding and Holzner offer two main critiques of my book. The first is that the most-similar comparisons of Chile/Argentina and El Salvador/Guatemala are imperfect because these countries are not identical. This is a fair point. Although I strongly believe that structured comparisons should remain a core part of the comparative politics repertoire, the truth is that such comparisons never approach anything resembling laboratory-like conditions. In my book, I attempt to get around this problem by both zooming in and zooming out: each of my four cases is subjected to in-depth, within-case analysis, and chapter 7 is devoted to a range of shadow cases. This kind of triangulation makes it possible to cast doubt on potential alternative explanations, such as Chile’s binomial electoral system. Because the binomial system was unique to Chile, it cannot explain broader variation in conservative party-building in Latin America. Even in Chile, its importance seems to have been overstated: when it was finally ended in 2015, this had no apparent effect on the country’s two main conservative parties.
Their second critique concerns the use of public opinion data. Even though my book does make use of such data—in chapter 3, for example, I present survey data showing that UDI voters in Chile have long held far more positive views of the Pinochet dictatorship than the broader population—I agree with Boulding and Holzner that there is more work to be done here. This brings me back to my earlier point about the collective nature of scholarship. It is my sincere hope that my book will inspire other political scientists to launch their own cross-national studies of conservative parties, including through greater use of public opinion data. This is how knowledge advances.
