This dialogue has been a welcome opportunity to think about Amanda Murdie’s excellent new book alongside my own. Reading them together settles a number of issues and raises others. First, I think we are thankfully past the stage of questioning whether NGOs (international or domestic) are important for politics. It is clear from her work and from my own that the non-governmental organizations around the world often have a significant impact—both in the ways that advocates would expect and in more political, more complicated, and more controversial ways as well. This is a great starting point for further research.

Second, there are many unanswered questions about how and why NGOs have different effects in different settings that deserve more scholarly attention, but to do so requires better data than we currently have. Murdie is quite kind in her characterization of my struggles to make the most of imperfect data. It is true that large-scale reliable data on non-governmental activities and organizations are scarce, often self-reported, and subject to all kinds of bias. My strategy was to test hypotheses using multiple types of data at different levels of analysis. Since the patterns that emerged were fairly consistent, I felt confidence in my findings that I never would have from any single test. Although this strategy is particularly useful when dealing with data of questionable quality, it is not a bad general strategy for social science research and it appeases the skeptic in me. I wholeheartedly agree with Murdie that this field of research could benefit from better organizational data and better survey data on issues of contact with NGOs and resulting changes in attitudes and behaviors.

I was also struck by how differently Murdie and I carve out the terrain of our analyses: Her work focuses on international NGOs, mine focuses only on democracies; hers focuses on human rights outcomes, mine on how people participate in politics. I think one benefit of reading these books together is it encouraged me to think further about how our findings interact. For example, I would assume, based on my own findings, that most of the organizations Murdie focuses on also have broad impacts on political participation among their domestic constituents. Is this part of why they are generally successful? Or part of why NGOs sometimes run into trouble with less democratic governments? More importantly, how does the influence NGOs have on participation shape how they affect human well-being and security? I don’t think the answers are obvious, but they are important and worth pursuing.

Many thanks for the opportunity to engage in this dialogue. I hope that others will follow suit and help us continue pushing this research agenda forward.