Agricultural Mechanization Changes Landowners’ Regime Preferences

• In Event: Politics of Land Reforms and Agrarian Change

Abstract

Theories of development and democratization conventionally assume that landed elites oppose democracy. In this paper, we explain how mechanization of agricultural production can change landowners’ political preferences. Agricultural mechanization reduces landowners' demand for labor and therefore their reliance on authoritarian coercion to maintain control over the supply and price of rural workers. A challenge to assessing this hypothesis is a dearth of survey data that assess landowners’ political preferences over time. We conduct a micro-level test of this argument using the only cross-national dataset that includes land ownership and agricultural machinery in its tally of respondents’ assets - data from three waves of the Asia Barometer survey in eighteen countries from 2005-2016. We consider whether landowners have significantly different views of and preferences for democracy compared to other citizens, and then test whether those attitudes differ among landowners who own tractors (which drastically reduce the demand for agricultural labor) compared to those who do not. Our findings explain why opposition to regime change seems to have attenuated among landowners in some countries: technological change tends to reduce the affinity that Barrington Moore noted decades ago between landowning and autocracy.

Authors

• Henry Thomson, Arizona State University

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