We thank Inken von Borzyskowki for positioning our book in the literature in an incisive and meticulous way: this is a great service to its potential audience. We also appreciate the broadening of the conversation to regime change and vote buying at the UN, among other topics. This helps us see potential synergies and cross-pollinations. One interesting idea, arising from the present exchange, for example, would be to combine the study of post-election violence, the forte of Borzyskowski’s book, with information drawn from our book on the partisan activities of foreign powers, to see whether and how partisan activities influence violence on the ground and whether international organizations play a moderating role.

We would like to add some context to Borzyskowski’s review of prior scholarship on partisan interventions. This scholarship started with two works using public opinion data, derived from two country cases riven by partisan divisions and beset by all-too-interested outsiders: Ukraine and Lebanon (Stephen Shulman and Stephen Bloom, “The Legitimacy of Foreign Intervention in Elections: The Ukrainian Response,” Review of International Studies 38, 2012; Daniel Corstange and Nikolay Marinov, “Taking Sides in Other People's Elections: The Polarizing Effect of Foreign Intervention,” American Journal of Political Science 53, 2012). These works probed voter responses in each of the two states experiencing interventions. Dov Levin's work on partisan interventions (cited by Borzyskowski) added for the first time the element of large-N data analysis, offering regression results on the effects of great power support on the electoral fortunes of candidates. With the infamous Russian intervention in the US elections, the question of voter responses to interventions is back in the limelight: Michael Tomz and Jessica Weeks show that Americans, like the Lebanese and Ukrainians, are divided along party lines on what to think about foreign meddling (“Public Opinion and Foreign Electoral Intervention,” forthcoming in the American Political Science Review). Thus, the future conversation is likely to oscillate between its inception in public opinion case-study data (often featuring survey experiments) and observational analyses of large-N cross-country outcomes such as margin of victory.

We thank Inken von Borzyskowski for a very careful reading and accurate restatement of our argument. We are also grateful for the painstaking consideration of our coding rules. The review alerted us to an important miscommunication. On p. 79, we write that the process variable “identifies whether the intervention of foreign powers enhanced, weakened, or had no observable effect on the electoral process.” We now see that this does not read as we meant it to. It should state that the process variable “identifies whether the intervention of foreign powers sought to enhance or weaken the democratic rules of the game.” The reviewer is correct that conflating outcomes with intentions is problematic. We trust that other readers (like the reviewer) will glean from our case studies that we sought to capture the foreign intent to change the rules, rather than its effects. Indeed, our goal was to provide a novel dataset of intent to make a difference (via some identifiable action), which would then help us and others further study whether interventions, in fact, had the intended effects.

Borzyskowski also points out that our large-N analysis is somewhat skeletal and does not have potentially relevant information on how candidates are polling and other covariates. We agree that such information would be highly desirable. Part of the difficulty is obtaining and adding good data on such background variables in our representative—but relatively limited in size—sample. Perhaps the time has come for the community of scholars studying elections to team up and collect systematic information on international activities surrounding elections. This would broaden our sample and add exciting new variables. It might also help us begin the study of novel forms of interventions such as spreading propaganda, including via social media, as suggested by the reviewer. We dare to hope that such collaborations by a number of the scholars cited in or part of this exchange will come about to push forward the exciting field that books like the one by von Borzyskowski are helping create.