Why were some reformers able to overcome logistical and acceptability constraints and successfully implement conditional repression, while other reform attempts failed? During the qualitative interviews that inform the descriptive accounts of reform efforts in Part II, reformers and other state actors suggested a number of potentially decisive factors. In this section, I evaluate the relative importance of the most commonly proposed factors. Three of these factors, I will argue, were the most decisive in facilitating the formulation and adoption of conditional approaches:

Three other factors may have played idiosyncratic roles in some of the cases, but were not decisive: a large pool of policy ideas to draw on, the largest cartel also being the most violent, and a leader not tied politically to status quo policies. Finally, three factors that reformers frequently emphasized appear to have played little role in practice: a forum for brainstorming without fear of superiors, delegation of responsibility by decision-makers to provide political cover, and what I call “Sino-Nixonian Effects”—the idea that, just as it took a known anti-communist like Nixon to open diplomatic relations with China, it takes a known hardliner on drug policy to implement conditional repression.