This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.

This chapter explores how the book’s arguments travel beyond the analyzed cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and discusses their broader implications for the field of comparative politics, in particular for the relationship among economic elites’ political representation, democracy, and inequality. It deals with questions such as: under what conditions will landowners respond to existential threats with electoral organization instead of by trying to destabilize democracy? When are candidate-centered strategies a viable substitute for party-building? Do the same factors that shape agrarian elites’ strategic choices explain how other interest groups organize to influence policymaking? First, the chapter tests the scope conditions of the argument by analyzing agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence in a country where democracy is less consolidated: Paraguay during the Lugo administration (2008–2012). Next, it looks at party-building by agrarian elites beyond South America, in a different historical context marked by civil war: post-1979 El Salvador. Finally, the chapter extends the argument beyond agrarian elites, focusing on nonpartisan electoral representation by other interest groups in two contemporary cases: for-profit universities in Peru and conservative religious groups in Colombia.

The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri unleashed a political earthquake in Lebanon. Tripoli and its surroundings became a Sunni base for the Future Movement, led by Rafiq Hariri’s son Saad and other neoliberal elites from Lebanon’s nouveaux riches political class. For the first time, Tripolitanians rallied around a political party based outside their own city.

Many Tripolitanians supported the Future Movement in 2005 because they hoped that Saad Hariri, with his personal wealth and connections to Saudi Arabia, might bring investments to marginalized areas in northern Lebanon. However, these expectations were not met.

The Future Movement was an elite-based party, and its strategies of outreach to the poor had severe shortcomings. It used divisive sectarian (anti-Shiʿi) electoral strategies in Tripoli and empowered Sunni radicals, leading to a spiral of violence. Sunni hardliners gained prominent roles in Tripoli after Hizbullah and its allies turned their weapons inwards in Beirut in May 2008. However, this sectarian resource was insufficient to help the Future Movement maintain its popularity in Tripoli in the long run.

The best remedy to populism in power is for liberal democrats to win elections, and in all populist regimes discussed in this book - Poland, Hungary, the Philippines, India, and Brazil - this remains a possibility, though in some countries (Hungary) it is more difficult than in others (Poland). Successful electoral strategies to defeat populism require coalition-making and high electoral turnout. Extra-electoral remedies, such as militant democracy or "cordon sanitaire", are less feasible and less compatible with democratic principles. The most important challenge is developing credible liberal-democratic policies to counter populist ones, which do not disparage the values of community, patriotism or collective pride. Liberalism has sufficient intellectual resources to support these values, now claimed by populist leaders.

This chapter examines the Indonesian labor movement’s unusual strategy of running union cadres as legislative candidates with a large number of non-programmatic parties. It begins by assessing parties’ motivations for entering into these partnerships with unions, tracking the evolving strategies of the two parties that engaged most systematically with unions. It then turns its attention to SPN and FSPMI, the two union federations that had the strongest organizational commitment to running legislative candidates in the period between 2004 and 2014. In both cases, the initial decision to engage in the legislative arena was necessarily taken by the central leadership. But, in SPN’s case, the poor showing of its candidates in the 2009 elections created internal friction, and the union quickly backed away from its organizational commitment to electoral politics. By contrast, FSPMI deepened its engagement in the 2014 legislative elections, resulting in the election of two union cadres to local legislative office in Bekasi. Unperturbed by the setbacks it experienced during the first Jokowi presidency, it again refined its institutional strategy for 2019.

This chapter examines Indonesian unions’ involvement in mayoral, district head, and gubernatorial races in our five field sites between 2005 and 2018. It explains how unions negotiated with candidates to secure political contracts, oral and written, promising patronage benefits and prolabor policies in return for votes. As the chapter shows, the content of these political contracts varied, as did the process through which they were reached. In some cases, they were little different from agreements struck with myriad community leaders who encouraged members of their communities to vote for the candidate in return for money or public goods like a new road. In others, the focus was firmly programmatic, emphasizing measures like better enforcement of labor regulations; more regular factory inspections; and affordable healthcare, housing, and transport. There were also enormous differences in the extent to which unions and candidates delivered on these contracts. But, even where they failed, they had the effect of raising the profile of labor issues as political issues and of unions as political actors—so much so that some unions decided to run candidates of their own.