John Medearis’s review makes three excellent points that merit further discussion: That the motivations of opposition actors are more diverse than the characterization provided in my book; that important features of the context in which these oppositional activities occur might matter a great deal; and that we might want to consider electoral protests as part of a broader democratization strategy.

To the first point, this project was inspired by the protest activities of ethno-nationalist political parties in Europe (e.g. Sinn Fein and Herri Batasuna), but was ultimately shaped by the empirical regularity revealed by extensive data collection: election boycotts were used most frequently by larger, general opposition parties, almost exclusively in developing countries. Thus, what began as a quest to understand the behavior of opposition actors with very specific aims morphed into a quest to understand certain tactics used by a wide range of opposition actors.

Nevertheless, the book sought to retain some of opposition actors’ distinctiveness by distinguishing between major and minor boycotts. Major boycotts are the focus of the book because the actors involved can be assumed to want greater democracy to serve their office-seeking interests. Minor boycotts are undertaken by smaller opposition parties with more of the distinctive characteristics identified in the review—distinct ideological traditions, ethnic divisions, and the militarization of politics. As the book demonstrates, these minor boycotts do not conform to the more straightforward patterns outlined for major boycotts and certainly merit further investigation.

To the second point, the book also acknowledged some of the very important context that might matter for opposition actors’ decisions by emphasizing the end of the Cold War. Granted, this is a contextual factor that should affect most opposition parties, but the empirical strategies I use allow for the impact of global dynamics to vary across the cases studied here.

Finally, the idea that electoral protests might be conceived of as part of a broader set of democratizing tactics beyond elections is also a critically important point, with which both scholars and practitioners observing elections grapple. This is a point I plan to address in my future research.

Addressing these questions requires a shift favoring depth of analysis over breadth. My next project makes this shift, focusing on cases that did not fit neatly into the framework of the first book. In this project, I attempt to understand why democratic politics in Guyana have produced cycles of ethnic violence rooted in partisan identity, but the same patterns of violence have not emerged in Trinidad, despite a similar salience of ethnicity in politics. Consideration of ethnic politics and partisan violence in the Caribbean allows me to address systematically one major factor that this book’s framework cannot account for—the importance of ethnic identities for politics. Furthermore, the empirical strategy of deep sub-national research combined with controlled, cross-national comparison, enables a more extensive consideration of distinctive features of opposition actors, and the specific historical, global, economic contexts that shape their goals and strategic choices both in the context of elections and beyond.