Politics of Land Reforms and Agrarian Change

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Scholarship on the quality of democracy and on regime change tends to overlook developments in the countryside. This is despite the fact that political scientists know that landowners play an outsized role in both regime change and in the policy process under democracy, and that average rural and urban voters often have very different political attitudes. This panel brings together scholars who explore distinct but related aspects of the impact of transformations in the countryside for the performance and quality of democracy. The papers include a case study of the impact of land reform in Peru that uses original survey data, a conjoint survey experiment in Zambia and Malawi exploring the impact of land titling on the declining importance of customary institutions and norms, a local-level analysis of the impact of land titling in Kenya on the gender gap in land tenure rights, and a cross-national analysis of AsiaBarometer surveys that considers the impact of agricultural mechanization on landowners’ attitudes towards democracy and dictatorship. In short, this panel explores a relatively overlooked facet of the conference’s theme of “Democracy, Difference and Destabilization.” Transformations in the countryside in developing democracies - whether in terms of land titling, land reform, or technological change - can have unforeseen and poorly understood consequences for the relative quality and stability of democracy. The four papers we hope to present consider different ways in which agrarian change can put democracy under stress - or generate more positive outcomes for democratic performance.

Sub Unit

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Land Reform and Human Capital Development: Evidence from Peru - Michael Albertus, University of Chicago

• Land Titling as Social Cleavage in Zambia and Malawi - Lauren Honig, Boston College; Adam Harris, University College London

• Agricultural Mechanization Changes Landowners’ Regime Preferences - Henry Thomson, Arizona State University; David J. Samuels, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Chair

• David J. Samuels University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Discussant

• Martha Wilfahrt University of California, Berkeley