Lord, Peasant...and Tractor? Agricultural Mechanization and Moore's Thesis

• In Event: The Politics of Land Reforms and Agrarian Change

Abstract

Conventional wisdom has long held that landed elites should oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners under autocracy will leverage their wealth and power to repress agricultural workers and prop up the status quo. Landlords' political and economic infuence weakens with capitalist development, while commercial, financial and industrial elites grow stronger. Yet economic growth doesn't just alter the political balance of forces; to the extent that landowners no longer need to control agricultural labor, it can actually change their
political preferences. This transition occurs when agrarian elites can substitute technology for labor. Mechanization not only dramatically increases agricultural productivity, it also drastically reduces the demand for agricultural labor, which eliminates the need for labor-repressive policies. We explain how the adoption of labor-saving technology in agriculture alters landowners' political preferences for different regimes, so that the more mechanized the agricultural sector, the more likely is democracy to emerge and survive. Our argument and findings offer a parsimonious revision to Moore's thesis that applies to the ongoing real-world transformation of agriculture since Social Origins first appeared, and provides novel insight into the political consequences of what is the largest shift in human residential and occupational patterns in world history.

Authors

• David J. Samuels, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Henry Thomson, Arizona State University