I appreciate Cynthia McClintock’s thoughtful review and am glad she understood and embraced my effort in Democratization by Institutions to examine how well the U.S. blueprint for democracy could work to democratize a nation after authoritarianism. Yet she would challenge me as well and take my effort even further, into the subsequent presidencies. She is correct. There is still room to examine how well the U.S. blueprint works during democratic consolidation.

Lacking space to address each of McClintock’s criticisms separately, let me place them in two broad categories: 1) My book does not go far enough, that is, into the 2000s, and is not broad enough because it does not examine political parties and civil society more thoroughly, and 2) she challenges my view of Carlos Menem, which is less negative than that of many scholars.

Let me begin with the first. The criticisms that I did not address what came after 1999 say more about the need for another book than they do about this one. I chose to end with 1999 because the book is a study of democratic transition, not consolidation, a process still ongoing today. I explain this choice in the book. With respect to parties and civil society, Democratization by Institutions is a study of the formal institutions of state. Parties are addressed by virtue of how they behaved inside the state institutions and civil society I studied in my 2010 book, Social Capital in Developing Democracies: Nicaragua and Argentina Compared.

McClintock also challenges my positive assessments of Menem. Indeed, she is quite kind, considering how far outside most scholarly opinion I stand with regard to Menem. I realized that my position would be controversial. Yet I stand by my conclusions, not because I am a fan of Menem but because I believe that democratic ends can be achieved unintentionally. Menem, hardly known for any deep commitment to democracy for its own sake, nevertheless achieved a number of reforms that sustain democratic function, including taming the labor unions, strengthening the economy, privatizing key services, and opening up higher education. Yes, he could have done better and more had he been less corrupt and not abused power. That is his loss and Argentina’s, but it should not blind us to the contributions he made.

McClintock challenges my comments about Argentina’s current president, Mauricio Macri, at the end of my book. Having just returned from another research trip to Argentina for a new project, I realize how correct she is. I was wrong about Macri and unfair. Macri is not personalistic. His government has been a good one, not characterized by power abuses. He would be further strengthened by having a recognizable party imprimatur behind him instead of a coalition.

In closing, I would like to return to McClintock’s comments about civil society. In Social Capital in Developing Democracies I studied Argentine civil society, arguing that social capital and mobilizational capacity were low there and that the nation would have to democratize by using its institutions. Democratization by Institutions then became a study of how that could be possible. After reading Social Capital, Anne Pitcher asked a searching question I could not answer at that time: “So, if social capital is so high in Nicaragua and so low in Argentina, can the one generate the other? Can Nicaragua’s high social capital strengthen institutions and can Argentina’s institutions increase social capital?” Today we have the beginning of an answer: While mobilizational capacity and social capital remain high in Nicaragua, they have not fortified institutions there, but in Argentina, institutions have definitely fortified social capital and mobilizational capacity as well. So civil society has thrived under democratization by institutions and, as of this writing, Argentina’s democracy looks to be in much better shape than Nicaragua’s. That is a discovery that matters for democracy everywhere.