Response to Gerald M. Easter's review of State-Building and Tax Regimes in Central America

Extract

This valuable review of my book identifies core points and three potential areas of deepening: newly emerging elites, additional cases, and the challenge of fiscal sociology research in Central America. I address each in turn. As noted, contemporary elites share many characteristics with traditional elites, who are accurately described as incestuous, exclusive, and self-perpetuating. Some of the newly emerging elites are indeed drawn from the very families and networks that produced prior generations of elites. This evolution has been usefully described in ethnographic work by Central Americans such as Marta Casaús Arzú and North Americans such as Jeffrey Paige. They note that despite continuities, there are important differences in contemporary elites, perhaps because of the democratic regimes in which they operate, and especially because of their location atop transnationally integrated production processes. Still, while this structural position produces both conflicts and coincidences of interest with traditional elite actors, the precise pattern of intraelite relations is the outcome of contingent social processes captured by the dimensions of cohesion and dominance. Different combinations of cohesion and dominance in intraelite relations serve as a useful beginning to the analysis of tax-regime outcomes.