“Civic engagement” is the cornerstone of democracy, right? Everyone knows we need more civic engagement—everyone, that is, except Ben Berger, whose willingness to argue against convention, particularly when that convention is a key tenet of good governmentism, makes me reflexively sympathetic to his argument. Berger and I both attack foundational assumptions of conventional democratic thought, but we differ in our approaches. I base my arguments on economic theory and quantitative analysis, whereas he bases his arguments primarily on interpretations of canonical theorists, most importantly Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville. Ultimately, I am convinced by Berger's argument that civic engagement is a messy concept that cannot be considered an “intrinsic good” for democracy, but like most formal theorists, I needed little convincing because the debate that he characterizes is remarkably similar to one that game theorists held some years ago, and resolved in the same direction. Ironically, then, he may face a more hostile audience from within his own subfield than outside of it.

Rational choice theorists and political theorists have much to gain in open exchange, as shown in Jon Elster's masterly analyses of Alexis de Tocqueville (1993, 2009) and Russell Hardin's engagement with David Hume (2009). Thus, I appreciate Justin Buchler's insights into my book, and since my points of agreement with him will be obvious, I will focus on the areas of contention.

A major debate in the literature on the political economy of development centers on the relationship between regime type and economic development. This debate has been heavily influenced by the East Asian development model, where authoritarianism has often gone hand in hand with high growth rates. In South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia, development has been propelled by authoritarian or semidemocratic regimes. One key element of this argument is that the repression of labor under these authoritarian regimes has been especially helpful in states' pursuit of high growth rates because it has ensured political stability and checked societal demands.

To what extent does Mobilizing Restraint provide insights that are useful to the study of developing countries beyond South Asia? This question deserves serious attention, but in raising doubts about whether my study has broader applicability, Erik Kuhonta does not engage key arguments in the book as well as much of the empirical evidence that I present to support them.

In his book, Erik Kuhonta advances an institutional theory of equitable development. He argues that an institutionalized party helps to promote social and human development by privileging public over private interests and by promoting programmatic politics rather than clientelistic exchange. A party is fully institutionalized when it is autonomous, coherent, and organizationally complex, but is rooted in society in a way that enables it to address the needs of the poor (pp. 23–24). To test his argument, Kuhonta draws on evidence from two sets of paired comparisons. The primary comparison is of Malaysia and Thailand, and in a separate chapter, he extends the argument by comparing the Philippines and Vietnam.