I'm familiar with Ferguson's work. As with most economic work based on theoretical models, the empirical facts are more than enough to disprove them. The famou

I'm familiar with Ferguson's work. As with most economic work based on theoretical models, the empirical facts are more than enough to disprove them. The famous IMF rebuttal of Piketty was an exercise in exactly the same. "rich in data, [but] the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain". The same applies to the Investment Theory of Party Alignment. You can make an argument that poor people will follow rich people ideologically, but you can't 1) draw a causal line between the wealth and the influence, and 2) most importantly, you can't prove that poor people would ideologically follow rich people against their own self-assessed interests. [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp16160.pdf https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2016/wp16160.pdf