In her gracious and incisive review, Miriam R. Lowi raises three main questions: 1) whether Russia is indeed a case of private domestic ownership (P1); 2) whether there is a fundamental difference between state ownership with control (S1) and without control (S2); and 3) whether we adequately take into account alternative explanations for the variation in ownership structure (OS) across petroleum-rich states over the twentieth century.

Although Miriam R. Lowi's primary goal is to explain “the enigma of Algeria” (p. 16), her analysis extends far beyond this individual country to shed light on questions that are of broad interest to students of comparative politics. Indeed, as is indicative of all so-called single-country case studies, her in-depth investigation of Algeria's postindependence trajectory—from its “unfulfilled expectations” in the 1980s to its “descent into violence” in the 1990s and then “the [state's] resurgence” in the 2000s (p. 7)—is at the outset an attempt to explain a larger class of phenomena. Lowi is quite explicit in this regard. In sum, she seeks to “extend [her] argument about Algeria” to explain, first, why oil-rich states experience different kinds of political stability in the face of similar economic shocks, and second, what role, if any, oil wealth has played in fueling these political outcomes (p. 17).

In writing my book, I had two principal and two secondary goals. My principal goals related to Algeria itself: first, to explain the country's peculiar trajectory with political stability and, eventually, its descent into violence, followed by its fascinating restabilization; second, to use the Algerian experience to contribute to the “rentier state” literature and show that oil has not been the “curse” that the “resource curse” folks suggest it to be. My secondary goals had to do with enriching and contextualizing the argument I was making about Algeria. I sought to do so in two ways: by offering “some preliminary comparisons” between Algeria's experience and that of other Middle Eastern oil-exporting states at times of economic shocks, and by cautiously extending the argument about variations in stability in Algeria to account for variations in stability in the four other countries. Four of the five empirical chapters of the book are devoted exclusively to Algeria; a single chapter—what I refer to as “a brief excursion into comparative analysis”—is devoted to Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia and the comparison with Algeria.

Like most fields of knowledge, political science tends to progress incrementally. Typically, a political scientist develops a model about a prominent institution or common behavior and that model becomes the starting point for understanding all its other permutations. This is especially the case in studies of American state and local government, which tend to follow theories of national politics. Scholars of state legislatures typically begin their analysis by using studies of the U.S. Congress, analysts of local elections start with presidential vote models, and so on. But, as Elaine Sharp reminds us in Does Local Government Matter?, we should not be so quick to assume that models or theories about national-level politics translate easily to the local level. In fact, local politics may operate under logics all their own.

One thing our books and mutual reviews show that we very much agree on is the challenge in the study of local politics of adapting data collected for other purposes to the testing of theories of interest. We also clearly agree that local government does matter—that is, that what it does affects the shape and character of local civic engagement. But it is not clear that we see the relevance of policy feedback theory for local government in the same way. Specifically, while J. Eric Oliver's review reveals an appreciation of the ways in which local government action may yield resource effects, the interpretive effects that are arguably the more innovative component of policy feedback theory may be underappreciated. It is likely that this difference links to a deeper, underlying difference in views on what it means for local government to matter.