Seth Masket’s thoughtful and provocative review raises a number of important questions, some of which are addressed in my book and some of which call for further research. His main concerns have to do with the generality of the book’s findings, its ability to isolate specific causes, and the broader implications of the theory.

Masket first asks whether the case studies—three from Argentina and three from Venezuela—are representative of the universe of elections in Latin America. In selecting these cases, I sought to address both this issue of representativeness and inferential problems. The six cases represent the range of variation across the two key independent variables, brand dilution and economic performance. At the same time, they help to account for potential confounds by allowing for overlapping comparisons: within a party over time, within a country across parties, and across two very different institutional contexts. In a follow-up book chapter (in Latin American Party Systems: Institutionalism, Decay, and Collapse, forthcoming), I have also extended the analysis to cases in Bolivia and Chile.

Raising another concern about generalizability, Masket asks whether the dire economic crises in these cases are unique. Indeed, Latin America was in unusual economic straits in the 1980s and 1990s. As a result, party leaders engaged in unusually dramatic forms of brand dilution, including some of the era’s most unabashed policy switches. Although this is unusual, it is also useful: it helps us observe the effects of brand dilution over a relatively short amount of time. These extreme cases may be unique, but they also teach us something about everyday politics, as my analyses of data from the United States and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems show. We may not observe such dramatic party breakdowns under normal circumstances, but we do see that party brands affect partisanship.

Are leftwing parties more susceptible to breakdown? In these particular cases, it was certainly traditionally leftwing parties that initiated the major policy switches. But rightwing parties were also hurt because the switch blurred the differences between them. In Argentina, although both Peronism and the UCR saw their partisan ranks eroded, it was the UCR that collapsed when the 2001 economic crisis hit. Indeed, in my case studies, the two phenomena—the inconsistency of leftwing parties abandoning their traditional positions and their convergence with the opposition—happen simultaneously. My theoretical model explains why each of these changes might independently affect partisan attachments. But it is hard to think of a real-world scenario where we observe one without the other. If we really want to know which factor matters more, we probably need to resort to experiments, as I do in the survey experiment in the book.

Finally, Masket wishes I had discussed the normative implications of party breakdowns more fully. Party Brands in Crisis, he argues, suggests “not only that parties help manage a democracy, but that democracies are terribly fragile in the absence of parties.” The book’s conclusion focuses on how party breakdowns undermine representation. Masket is right that they can also leave democratic institutions more vulnerable. Then again, recent events suggest democracies may generally be more fragile than they seem.