This book is the result of a long, didactic, and collegial process. In the time between the start and finish of this project, we experienced significant changes in our academic careers and our personal lives. Four of us made the transition from graduate student to assistant professor during the course of writing this book. As a group tally, we began the project with one little girl in our midst and ended with eight young children. At the project's start, we all lived a distance of roughly ten miles from each other around Duke University; at one point toward the project's end, we were spread across three continents.

Our research cluster gathered for the first time in the spring of 1998 in the office of the only author of this study who then already held a faculty position, Herbert Kitschelt. We had recently been given an early peek at a significant new dataset, the first round of the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America survey, created by scholars at the University of Salamanca under the leadership of Manuel Alcántara Sáez. Most of us present at this meeting were second- and third-year graduate students whose research interests focused on Latin America. The project would be to undertake a thorough investigation into the nature of programmatic party competition in Latin America, an analytical question on which Kitschelt had just completed a book with data from postcommunist Eastern Europe.