The Authoritarian Legacies of a Village Development Program in South Korea

• In Event: New Work on the Historical Political Economy of Asia

Abstract

How does a nationwide rural development program in a rapidly industrializing authoritarian country affect economic and political outcomes in the long run? This paper investigates the long-term political economic legacies of a village development program established during the dictatorship in South Korea in the 1970s. We digitize micro data on the government’s cash transfers to rural villages from the administrative records and merge those data with township-level election outcomes from the 1970s to the 2010s. The results indicate that rural villages that received larger cash transfers cast more votes for the authoritarian incumbent party in the next election. We also show that the political effects of the authoritarian rural development program persisted for forty years and appeared in the 2012 election, in which the dictator’s daughter was elected as a democratic president. Furthermore, using night-time satellite images and agricultural censuses, we provide evidence that the findings are driven by a political legacy in beneficiary areas, but not by long-term income gains from the program. To the best of our knowledge, we offer the first empirical evidence at a micro level examining how a dictator’s development policy establishes a long-standing authoritarian legacy, shadowing the politics of a consolidated democracy.

Author

• Ji Yeon (Jean) Hong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology