I appreciate Lee Ann Banaszak's thoughtful and insightful comments about my book. As she notes, there is a tendency in the kind of work we both do to focus on specific aspects of the complex policy process; her research on the role of the bureaucracy in policymaking makes her particularly well-positioned to identify the ways that a deeper focus on this area might have contributed to my own analysis of the Chilean case.

Banaszak critiques my analysis for inadequately examining the internal workings of the women's ministry, Sernam. While my book includes more on the internal dynamics of Sernam than suggested by the review, I concede that this is an area where there is room for deeper exploration. For example, my analysis of Sernam includes a discussion of how the first Ministers were not connected to the women's movement but were “converted” to feminism in the course of their tenure at the Ministry. The book would benefit from more detail about how this conversion process took place, and how the feminists inside the Ministry who influenced the Ministers in this way may also have impacted the shape of the Ministry's policy development. Likewise, I discuss how the first Socialist Minister, appointed in 2000, by Socialist President Ricardo Lagos, failed to live up to the expectations of feminists that a left-wing Minister would be more assertive on women's rights because this Minister, too, did not have linkages to the feminist movement. (Here I do, in fact, address the alternative explanation that the change to a Socialist administration was the main factor in progress on women's rights policy in recent years; I discuss why significant progress did not take place until the Bachelet administration.) Nevertheless, more detail on the internal dynamics of the Ministry during these periods, particularly on debates over policy direction, would help flesh out the larger context of my analysis.

The lack of detail on the inner workings of Sernam reflects less an oversight in theory than a reflection of the difficulty of collecting what amounts to quite politically charged information. The fact that my research analyzed on-going legislative debates and focused on current office holders limited the ability of members of the bureaucracy to open up about internal disagreements over strategy. It most assuredly limited or precluded them from revealing details about their own maneuvers to push a more feminist agenda from their positions inside the state. Indeed, many of the most intriguing and interesting examples from Banaszak's book—of insider feminists photocopying documents secretly after work hours or of surreptitiously altering the wording on briefs—could only be safely told once the people involved were out of office and jobs were not on the line. By contrast, in my interviews with members of Sernam's staff, each staff member carefully spoke in terms of the ministry's policy positions and downplayed internal disagreements over policy development. This is evidence not of a lack of internal debate over policy, but of a tightly controlled political environment that precluded open discussion over the internal workings of the Ministry. In fact, the most revealing details in my book about Sernam's internal dynamics came from my interviews with recently retired staff members.

Ultimately, more data on the internal struggles over policy development within Sernam would not have altered my theory about the determinants of feminist policy change but would have illuminated additional opportunities for strategic negotiation among legislators, feminists in civil society, and members of Sernam. I am grateful to Lee Ann Banaszak for identifying an important area for future research on feminist politics in Latin America.