When Women Win: Land Lotteries and Civic Participation in Georgia

• In Event: Frontiers in Historical Political Economy

Abstract

We exploit the 1805 Georgia Land Lottery to estimate the effect of wealth on civic engagement and democratic lawmaking, as measured by petitions to Congress and the Georgia state legislature. We argue that a positive shock to wealth can incentivize winners to protect their new assets using democratic channels, and provide them a change in social status that increases civic participation via petitioning. Importantly, we also focus on a never before studied population – that of female land lottery applicants and winners, who were widows allowed to enter Georgia’s first land lottery. Widows were particularly positioned to benefit from such a windfall, due to inheritance laws and dower rights in Georgia that allowed women to retain property via trust. Using micro-level data on land lottery winners and losers, land plots, and petition outcomes from 1805-1820, we estimate the causal effect of wealth windfalls on democratic participation.

Authors

• Ali Cirone, Yale ISPS / Cornell University

• Aaron Childree, Cornell University

• Harry Dienes, Cornell University