Book by Mike Albertus
Oxford Handbook of Authoritarian Politics, 2024
Redistribution of resources within societies is surprisingly widespread under authoritarianism de... more Redistribution of resources within societies is surprisingly widespread under authoritarianism despite the inability of citizens in such societies to demand it at the polls. It is not just aimed at lining insiders’ pockets or stamping out pockets of resistance. Many authoritarian regimes proactively deploy
redistributive policies in an effort to undercut rival elites and ensnare citizens in relations of longterm dependence. These policies are typically more effective at entrenching authoritarian rule than using wide-scale repression or coup-proofing against strictly elite-based threats. Authoritarian
regimes typically front-load asset redistribution, and then structure ownership and subsequent income and insurance-based redistribution to channel state control and, ultimately, to consolidatetheir own power and stave off threats to it.
Cambridge University Press, 2021
Major land reform programs have reallocated property in more than one-third of the world's countr... more Major land reform programs have reallocated property in more than one-third of the world's countries in the last century and impacted over one billion people. But only rarely have these programs granted beneficiaries complete property rights. Why is this the case, and what are the consequences? This book draws on wide-ranging original data and charts new conceptual terrain to reveal the political origins of the property rights gap. It shows that land reform programs are most often implemented by authoritarian governments who deliberately withhold property rights from beneficiaries. In so doing, governments generate coercive leverage over rural populations and exert social control. This is politically advantageous to ruling governments but it has negative development consequences: it slows economic growth, productivity, and urbanization and it exacerbates inequality. The book also examines the conditions under which subsequent governments close property rights gaps, usually as a result of democratization or foreign pressure.
Cambridge University Press, 2018
This book argues that in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, an... more This book argues that in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens, democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. The study provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Albertus and Menaldo also conduct detailed case studies of Chile and Sweden. In doing so, they explain why some democracies successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions for more egalitarian social contracts.
Cambridge University Press, Sep 17, 2015
When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land re... more When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A longstanding literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and more targeted at the poor under democracy. Yet comprehensive historical data to test this claim has been lacking. This book shows that land redistribution - the most consequential form of redistribution in the developing world - occurs more often under dictatorship than democracy. It offers a novel theory of land reform and develops a typology of land reform policies. Albertus leverages original data spanning the world and dating back to 1900 to extensively test the theory using statistical analysis and case studies of key countries such as Egypt, Peru, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. These findings call for rethinking much of the common wisdom about redistribution and regimes.
Articles by Mike Albertus
Journal of Politics, 2024
Scholars have long recognized that reform policies shape mass politics. We theorize how reform im... more Scholars have long recognized that reform policies shape mass politics. We theorize how reform impacts two key but underexamined groups – eligible nonbeneficiaries and ineligible individuals – in addition to beneficiaries and payers. We argue that proximity to policy consequences and the extent of policy reform shapes the behavior of these groups and can drive otherwise unanticipated political dynamics, including backlash against reformers. We test the theory using original data on a major redistributive reform: mid-1970s land reform in Portugal. Exploiting variation in local land reform intensity and a plausibly exogenous “bump” in reform treatment that disproportionately increased proximity to reform in areas of low policy intensity, we find that the reform party, the Communists, retained appeal where land reform was intense but lagged politically in most parishes where reform was partial, mainly among eligible nonbeneficiaries. Counter-reform through land returns then drove polarization, including gains for the right among ineligible nonbeneficiaries.
Comparative Political Studies, 2024
Many authoritarian regimes seek to blunt everyday acts of resistance and social mobilization thro... more Many authoritarian regimes seek to blunt everyday acts of resistance and social mobilization through co-optation rather than adopting riskier tools like outright repression. When these regimes transition to democracy, what are the political imprints of these localized experiences from the authoritarian era? We examine this question in Portugal, where rural corporatist institutions known as Casas do Povo sought to co-opt peasants and dismantle worker mobilization in the fascist era. We find conditional effects for the consequences of rural co-optation in Portugal’s restive southern region, where Casas do Povo took on particular importance given ongoing social mobilization over exploitative labor conditions in the countryside. Absent robust co-optation, social mobilization in the fascist era translated into greater support for the left-wing Portuguese Communist Party after democratization and less support for the right. But the electoral legacies of social mobilization are absent where the fascist regime created early Casas do Povo, facilitating co-optation.
Democratization, 2021
Authoritarian-era elites often do not quietly withdraw from political life after democratic trans... more Authoritarian-era elites often do not quietly withdraw from political life after democratic transitions. Recent scholarship shows how elites can often perpetuate their influence under democracy through authoritarian successor parties. But what are the implications for the quality of democracy when former authoritarian elites lack visible formal organization under democracy yet manage to obtain a wide range of influential positions across government? We begin to answer this question using original data on authoritarian-era elites and their official positions under Latin American democracy from 1900 to 2010. We find that former authoritarian elites' access to influential posts across state and government institutions per se matters for the overall quality of democracy, regardless of whether elites are organized in an authoritarian successor party or democracy operates under holdover authoritarian institutions. This finding is an important corrective to the prevailing notion that the survival of authoritarian-era elite individuals after democratic transition hinges on the survival of authoritarian-era parties. Elites may be broadly dispersed across parties under democracy, but their influence is undiluted when they are also broadly dispersed across state and government.
Journal of Democracy, 2021
We examine the nature of democratic fragilities in the Americas through survey experiments in Arg... more We examine the nature of democratic fragilities in the Americas through survey experiments in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. Encouragingly, strong majorities of citizens recognize violations of democratic principles, laws, and norms. How incumbents justify anti-democratic actions also has little impact on how citizens view them. But there are minorities of 10-35% of people who support efforts to erode democracy. And partisanship matters: many individuals are seemingly “conditional democrats” who support anti-democratic actions if they voted in the incumbent. People are also reluctant to support impeachment for democratic violations, which would-be authoritarians can exploit.
Comparative Political Studies, 2023
Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countr... more Patchiness in rural development remains a salient feature of many developed and developing countries that have struggled historically to overcome enormous national disparities in economic structure and well-being. This paper examines how one major, explicit rural policy ostensibly aimed at rural advancement – land reform – can impact uneven development in the countryside. It does so in Italy, where a major land reform redistributed large landholdings to individual peasant families after World War II. Based on original fine-grained data on land redistribution and a geographical regression discontinuity analysis that takes advantage of Italy’s zonal approach to land reform, I find that greater land reform fueled underdevelopment and precarity locally over the long term. Several related mechanisms delayed development in land reform zones: a slower transition out of agriculture, lower labor mobility, and an aging demographic. These are generalizable mechanisms that could operate in other cases of land reform aside from Italy.
Journal of Politics, 2023
Many authoritarian regimes use policy-based strategies of social control instead of more coercive... more Many authoritarian regimes use policy-based strategies of social control instead of more coercive tools like repression. When these regimes transition to democracy, do authoritarian successors pay a political price for such policies? This paper examines the political cost of one common authoritarian policy of social control – land settlement schemes – in Spain. The Franco dictatorship initiated a decades-long program to ameliorate land pressure by resettling excess rural labor in hundreds of new government-created towns in colonization zones throughout the country. This paper examines post-democratization voting patterns in municipalities containing new towns compared to a counterfactual set of proximate similar municipalities that were also in government-created colonization zones. I find that land settlement caused a backlash once Spain returned to democracy: voters disproportionately supported the left at the expense of the regime’s successor parties. I attribute this to a legacy of authoritarian political and economic oversight and manipulation in regime-created towns.
Journal of Development Economics, 2020
The early establishment and persistence of landholding inequality is linked to poor long-run deve... more The early establishment and persistence of landholding inequality is linked to poor long-run development outcomes. One crucial channel runs through human capital: large landowners historically underinvested in public goods such as schools, restricted workers and their children from to attending school, and extracted surplus from laborers that could have been invested in human capital. By equalizing landholdings, land redistribution should facilitate human capital accumulation. Using original data on land reform across Peru in the 1970s paired with household surveys, we conduct an age cohort analysis and find instead that higher exposure to land reform negatively impacted educational attainment as measured by the number of years of school attended. The driving mechanisms appears to be economic opportunity and income and child labor: individuals exposed to land reform are more likely to remain in rural areas and to have their children contribute labor to agriculture, driving down income in the long term.
Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2020
Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the "Great Divergence" between r... more Many scholars point to landholding inequality as a root cause of the "Great Divergence" between rich and poor countries over the last few centuries. Large landowners who fear being eclipsed by the masses or rival industrial elites and seek to preserve social and economic rents underinvest in public goods, block rural-urban migration, and keep peasants poor and subservient. By eliminating large landowners and enabling new policy initiatives, extensive land reform holds potential to vastly and directly improve peasant livelihoods, facilitate human capital formation, and enhance economic and social mobility. We demonstrate that this failed to occur in Peru despite a sweeping land reform that redistributed half of all private land to peasants. Using original localized land reform data and a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits unevenness in reform implementation, we show that greater land reform intensity in Peru generated more poverty and stunted human development. This occurred because land reform encouraged rural demographic stasis, generated widespread land informality and property rights instability, and reduced political competitiveness. Although the government's distortionary management of post-reform cooperatives certainly did not maximize their development potential, evidence suggests that Peru's land reform failed to promote development because of broader inherent features of the reform.
American Journal of Political Science, 2020
How does land reform impact civil conflict? This paper examines this question in the prominent ca... more How does land reform impact civil conflict? This paper examines this question in the prominent case of Peru by leveraging original data on all land expropriations under military rule from 1969-1980 and event-level data from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on rural killings
during Peru's internal conflict from 1980-2000. Using a regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of Peru’s regional approach to land reform through zones that did not entirely map onto major pre-existing administrative boundaries, I find that greater land reform dampened subsequent conflict. Districts in core areas of land reform zones that received intense land reform witnessed less conflict relative to comparable districts in adjacent peripheral areas where less land reform occurred.
Further tests suggest that land reform mitigated conflict by facilitating counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering, building local organizational capacity later used to deter violence, undercutting the Marxist left, and increasing opportunity costs to supporting armed groups.
Economics & Politics, 2019
Despite received wisdom that long time horizons and formal institutions can induce private invest... more Despite received wisdom that long time horizons and formal institutions can induce private investment under dictatorship, there is substantial investment even in relatively unconstrained regimes. This paper provides a novel explanation for the puzzle of investment in these regimes: economic elites uncertainty over expected investment returns under plausible alternative authoritarian successors. We construct a noisy signaling model that captures how uncertainty over which type of authoritarian successor will rule next and uncertainty in the truthfulness of policy promises made by potential autocratic successors might provide incentives for elite investment.
World Development, 2019
How do commodity shocks impact the privatization of public lands? This paper examines this questi... more How do commodity shocks impact the privatization of public lands? This paper examines this question through the lens of the establishment of private property rights over public lands in Colombia, which has had one of the Western Hemisphere's largest public land distribution programs during the last century. Using data on exogenous international coffee price shocks along with data on land suitability for coffee production as determined by agro-climatic conditions and roughly 250,000 public land grants, I find that coffee price increases generate more public land grants in municipalities where land is more suited to coffee production. Additional tests suggest that the findings are driven by the power of organized cultivators to steer the land grant process in their favor. The findings shed light on the role of organized actors in the countryside extending private extension of control over public territory – a phenomenon that has drastically diminished public lands and natural spaces in numerous countries over the last two centuries.
Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2019
Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through re-election... more Why do some former authoritarian elites return to power after democratization through re-election or re-appointment to political office, or by assuming board positions in state-owned or major private enterprises, whereas others do not and still others face punishment? This paper investigates this question using an original dataset on constitutional origins and the fate of the upper echelon of outgoing authoritarian elites across Latin America from 1900-2015. I find that authoritarian elites from outgoing regimes that impose a holdover constitution that sticks through democratization are more likely to regain political or economic power––especially through national positions where the potential payoffs are largest––and less likely to face severe or nominal punishment. I also find a positive role for political capital among former elites. These results are robust to alternative explanations of authoritarian elites' fate and using instrumental variables to address potential endogeneity. The findings have important implications for democratic consolidation and quality.
Political Science Research and Methods, 2019
This Research Note examines key issues of fit between theory and methods in the study of distribu... more This Research Note examines key issues of fit between theory and methods in the study of distributive politics. While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly examined differences between individual and aggregate analyses of a distributive program. By leveraging nationwide individual-level data on both revealed voter preferences and the actual receipt of particularistic benefits through a contemporary Venezuelan land reform initiative, this Research Note demonstrates that scholars can most effectively test and refine individual-level theories of distributive politics by combining both individual and macro-level data. There are at least two advantages to doing so. First, comparing and contrasting findings from data at different levels of analysis can enable researchers to paint a more complete picture of distributive targeting. Second, when distributive benefits can be impacted or redirected by subnational politicians, as is common with many distributive programs, individual-level data alone can generate mistaken inferences that are an artifact of competing targeting attempts at different levels of government instead of initial targeting strategies. I demonstrate both of these points and discuss practical and simple recommendations regarding data collection strategies for the purposes of effectively testing theories of distributive politics.
Annual Review of Political Science, 2016
Recent work has documented an upward trend in inequality since the 1970s that harks back to the G... more Recent work has documented an upward trend in inequality since the 1970s that harks back to the Gilded Age: the inegalitarian pre–World War I world. Most prominently, Thomas Piketty argues in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that this is partially due to the fact that capitalism is hardwired to exacerbate the gap between the rich and poor. By critically evaluating recent literature on this topic, this article offers three big contributions. First, we advance an alternative explanation for the long-term U-shaped nature of inequality that Piketty examines. Political regime types and the social groups they empower, rather than war and globalization, can account for the sharp fall and then sharp rise in inequality over the long 20th century. Second, we demonstrate that this U-shaped pattern only really holds for a handful of industrialized economies and a subset of developing countries. Finally, we provide a unified framework centered on two unorthodox assumptions that can explain inequality patterns beyond the U-shaped one. Capitalists and landholders actually prefer democracy if they can first strike a deal that protects them after transition. This is because dictators are not the loyal servants of the economic elite they are portrayed to be—in fact, they are often responsible for soaking, if not destroying, the rich under autocracy.
World Politics, 2017
Are large landowners, especially those engaged in labor-dependent agriculture, detrimental to dem... more Are large landowners, especially those engaged in labor-dependent agriculture, detrimental to democratization and subsequent democratic survival? This assumption is at the heart of both canonical and recent influential work on regime transition and durability. Using an original panel dataset on the extent of labor-dependent agriculture in countries across the world since 1930, I find that labor-dependent agriculture was historically bad for democratic stability and stunted suffrage extension, parliamentary independence, and free and fair elections. However, the negative influence of labor-dependent agriculture on democracy started to turn positive around the time of democracy's Third Wave. The dual threats of land reform and costly domestic insurgencies in that period – often with more potent consequences under dictators – plausibly prompted landowners to push for democracy with strong horizontal constraints and favorable institutions that could protect their property over the long term with more reliability than dictatorship. The shift in support for democracy by labor-dependent landowners is a major untold story of democracy's Third Wave, and helps explain the persistent democratic deficit in many new democracies.
American Journal of Political Science, 2017
Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economi... more Influential recent scholarship assumes that authoritarian rulers act as perfect agents of economic elites, foreclosing the possibility that economic elites may at times prefer democracy absent a popular threat from below. Motivated by a puzzling set of democratic transitions, we relax this assumption and examine how elite uncertainty about dictatorship – a novel and generalizable causal mechanism impacting democratization – can induce elite support for democracy. We construct a noisy signaling model in which a potential autocrat attempts to convince economic elites that he will be a faithful partner should elites install him in power. The model generates clear predictions about how two major types of elite uncertainty – uncertainty in a potential autocratic successor's policies produced by variance in the pool of would-be dictator types, and uncertainty in the truthfulness of policy promises made by potential autocratic successors – impact the likelihood of elite-driven democratization. We demonstrate the model's plausibility in a series of cases of democratic transition. Word Count: 9,826
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Book by Mike Albertus
redistributive policies in an effort to undercut rival elites and ensnare citizens in relations of longterm dependence. These policies are typically more effective at entrenching authoritarian rule than using wide-scale repression or coup-proofing against strictly elite-based threats. Authoritarian
regimes typically front-load asset redistribution, and then structure ownership and subsequent income and insurance-based redistribution to channel state control and, ultimately, to consolidatetheir own power and stave off threats to it.
Articles by Mike Albertus
during Peru's internal conflict from 1980-2000. Using a regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of Peru’s regional approach to land reform through zones that did not entirely map onto major pre-existing administrative boundaries, I find that greater land reform dampened subsequent conflict. Districts in core areas of land reform zones that received intense land reform witnessed less conflict relative to comparable districts in adjacent peripheral areas where less land reform occurred.
Further tests suggest that land reform mitigated conflict by facilitating counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering, building local organizational capacity later used to deter violence, undercutting the Marxist left, and increasing opportunity costs to supporting armed groups.
redistributive policies in an effort to undercut rival elites and ensnare citizens in relations of longterm dependence. These policies are typically more effective at entrenching authoritarian rule than using wide-scale repression or coup-proofing against strictly elite-based threats. Authoritarian
regimes typically front-load asset redistribution, and then structure ownership and subsequent income and insurance-based redistribution to channel state control and, ultimately, to consolidatetheir own power and stave off threats to it.
during Peru's internal conflict from 1980-2000. Using a regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of Peru’s regional approach to land reform through zones that did not entirely map onto major pre-existing administrative boundaries, I find that greater land reform dampened subsequent conflict. Districts in core areas of land reform zones that received intense land reform witnessed less conflict relative to comparable districts in adjacent peripheral areas where less land reform occurred.
Further tests suggest that land reform mitigated conflict by facilitating counterinsurgency and intelligence gathering, building local organizational capacity later used to deter violence, undercutting the Marxist left, and increasing opportunity costs to supporting armed groups.