This valuable review of my book identifies core points and three potential areas of deepening: newly emerging elites, additional cases, and the challenge of fiscal sociology research in Central America. I address each in turn. As noted, contemporary elites share many characteristics with traditional elites, who are accurately described as incestuous, exclusive, and self-perpetuating. Some of the newly emerging elites are indeed drawn from the very families and networks that produced prior generations of elites. This evolution has been usefully described in ethnographic work by Central Americans such as Marta Casaús Arzú and North Americans such as Jeffrey Paige. They note that despite continuities, there are important differences in contemporary elites, perhaps because of the democratic regimes in which they operate, and especially because of their location atop transnationally integrated production processes. Still, while this structural position produces both conflicts and coincidences of interest with traditional elite actors, the precise pattern of intraelite relations is the outcome of contingent social processes captured by the dimensions of cohesion and dominance. Different combinations of cohesion and dominance in intraelite relations serve as a useful beginning to the analysis of tax-regime outcomes.

I am also appreciative of the opportunity to extend State-Building and Tax Regimes to contemporary Costa Rica, a country that appears in the English version of the book in historical and quantitative comparison but not among the detailed case studies. To shed light on comparative politics theories, a Costa Rica chapter was not useful, but readers may be pleased to know that a Spanish version of the book that targets policy-oriented readers in the region will include such a chapter. Changes to the Costa Rican tax regime focus attention on institutional variables that bear the legacy of a compromise struck after revolution in 1948. At that time, a powerful popular movement and the emerging import-substituting industrial elites of the day agreed on a fiscal model that raised balanced revenues and supported a social-democratic welfare state. The institutions consolidated during ensuing decades show far more durability than the war-torn institutions of the rest of the region, presenting obstacles to contemporary Costa Rican emerging elites who are otherwise cohesive and dominant. The mismatch between emerging elites and inherited institutions is the main explanation for the contemporary lack of fiscal reform, declining quasi-voluntary compliance, and chronic fiscal problems.

Finally, fiscal sociology has enjoyed a recent resurgence, but it remains a difficult field to build. One reason is that the concepts mobilized are connected through complicated recursive effects among economic, social, political, and fiscal variables; causality works at first in one direction and then another. The Central American cases urge a focus on the economic transformations of social actors who build state institutions and policies that show up in changes to tax regimes. It would be of great benefit to the region if these changes to tax regimes included progressive policies that could reshape highly unequal societies. That is unfortunately not the case.