We thank Isabela Mares for her thoughtful and insightful review of our book. As her review indicates, our works are quite complementary. Both emphasize competing elites, the differences between wealth that comes from industry and that which comes from the land, and skepticism about the claims of what we call the “redistributivist” literature. However, a critical dialogue without critical engagement is hardly stimulating, and we do think there is a broader area of tension between our work and Mares’s that speaks to wider questions in research design in comparative politics, namely, the tension between micro- and macropolitical studies.

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.

Herein lies the risk of subnational work on regime change. In Mares’s work, it is local conditions that matter: Is a seat competitive? How at risk are landowners of their peasants moving to a nearby city? How easy is it for factory owners to monitor their workers? Within each district, the balance of these forces favors or disfavors liberal or illiberal forces. Yet it is not clear that this tells us a great deal about elites’ ability to control or take over the central government. That question turns on the national balance of material success, which may not reduce cleanly to district-by-district politics. Mares’s work is hugely helpful in explaining the steady march of democratic reforms, such as the prevention of intimidation, but it less clear whether a collection of micro studies can add up to explaining macro patterns of change. Hence, our rejoinder to her suggestion is that our book is simply operating at a different level of analysis, one where data are less abundant, and possibly more poorly measured and less comparable, but one that nonetheless addresses a core—perhaps the core—question of comparative politics: Why do nations change?