Rural Unrest and Land Reform in Portugal

• In Event: Strategies of Authoritarian Rule

Abstract

During the brief interlude between Salazar’s autocratic rule and
Portugal’s transition to democracy in the mid-1970s, a wave of rural unrest pushed a series of short-lived military and civilian
governments to expropriate and redistribute half of all private land in the south of the country – roughly one million hectares. The link between pressure and reform was uneven: not all of the land that was expropriated saw organized land invasions and occupations, and some of the land that experienced rural unrest was ultimately not expropriated. Taking both the periods preceding and following these events into consideration, this paper explores (a) how cycles of rural pressure and unrest during regime transition impacted the nature and scope of land distribution programs; and (b) the development consequences of land reform after Portuguese democratization. It does so by geographically linking patterns of land distribution in Portugal
with waves of land invasions and tracing the development trajectories of various combinations of rural mobilization and reform in the years following the end of Portuguese dictatorship. By studying the democratic drivers and autocratic legacies of land reform in Portugal, we seek to better theorize the critical role of periods of political change in transforming social and economic legacies and relations across regime types.

Authors

• Michael Albertus, University of Chicago

• Noah Schouela, University of Chicago