Making Sense of a Model: A Response to J. Samuel Valenzuela

Abstract

am very pleased to start a dialogue with Samuel Valenzuela, although, because he reveals that he was one of the anonymous reviewers of my article, I have to point out that he was the only one out of five who disagreed with the editor's decision to publish it. I hope that the dialogue might extend to other interested readers who can find my approach more helpful and challenging from the beginning. Valenzuela declares himself to be for what I call explicitly comparative, theory-driven analysis, which is more characteristic of the social sciences but I am not sure that he understands some basic features of this approach. Rather typically for outsiders, he finds that a formal model is simplistic and has abstract flatness, and then, instead of trying to exploit the insights from the model for further discussion and applications, he refers to a number of unrelated empirical details and specifications. There is an unavoidable trade-off: the more general the model is-and it must be general in order to permit comparative analysis-the simpler and flatter it has to be. But generality implies a focus on the core variables of the problem, which, once well identified, should help the observer make sense of all the details and their relative importance or irrelevance. I do not think that any of the empirical details specified by Valenzuela help him deny the validity of my model at all. First, about the model. It is valid not only for social classes, as Valenzuela interprets; this can be one of the applications, but I am referring to groups of voters with different political preferences, which, of course, may include ethnic, territorial, religious, or other defined groups. Actually, I explicitly say in the article that distances in the model may reflect social structures, values, or ideological opinions. I also refer to of voters in a way rather usual in political science and sociology literature, while, of course, more formal political coalitions are formed by parties and leaders. Regarding the threatening character of a group of voters, it will certainly depend on the status quo. Thus, for example, the introduction of women's voting rights, which has traditionally not been considered strongly threatening for a rather moderate or conservative status quo, as I comment in my article, can be more destabilizing if the status quo is a government held by anticlerical forces, as Valenzuela argues. But again, these are different possible