This chapter uses the story of a Peronist broker mobilizing electoral support in an Argentine slum for the center-right coalition Cambiemos – the opposition to the Peronists – to introduce the central questions of this book: Why do parties rely on brokers to reach voters in slums? How can challenger parties recruit brokers to credibly compete with, and beat, hegemonic machine parties in impoverished districts? Why would brokers switch to work for a nonmachine party? The case of Cambiemos’ 2015 victory over Peronism in poor municipalities in Argentina offers valuable insights into how parties can unexpectedly challenge entrenched machine parties in democracies in the Global South and under what conditions brokers might change their party affiliation.

This chapter offers the final remarks. First, it recapitulates that slums and vulnerable neighborhoods’ spatial segregation compels their residents to seek out brokers who can facilitate their access to state resources. Machine parties excel in recruiting brokers to connect with voters in pockets of poverty, with the Peronist Party (PJ) in Argentina, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Indian National Congress (INC) in India traditionally viewed as classic examples. However, this book challenges the conventional perception of these parties by demonstrating that segregated vulnerability imposes conditions on any party seeking electoral competitiveness in these areas. Specifically, it details how challengers to the PJ, PRI, and INC developed their networks and ultimately disrupted the long-standing dominance of these machine parties. This chapter reviews how the book challenges the notion that some parties are inherently more machine-based than others. Second, the chapter recalls that it is misleading to assume that the disappearance of brokers would necessarily benefit the poor. The root of clientelism and its associated issues lies not in the existence of brokers but in the segregated vulnerability and isolation of these territories – in essence, poverty shapes politics. This perspective reframes the role of brokers as a response to structural conditions rather than a cause of political dysfunction.

This chapter presents the theoretical argument and the contributions of the book to the existing literature on clientelism, machine parties, and party adaptation. It offers a novel perspective on how strong competitors to dominant machine parties emerge in impoverished districts. Challenging parties can defy hegemonic machine parties, not by altering their policy programs, but by recruiting brokers to compete for the votes of the poor. Brokers’ commodification and machine parties’ factionalism can provide challengers with the opportunity to build their own broker networks to compete with machine parties. In the Global South, it is not economic development but rather poverty and vulnerability that can create the conditions for the rise of party competition against dominant machines.