Land reform and agrarian socialism in interwar Europe: Evidence from 1930s Spain before civil war

Jordi Domènech, Ilona Lahdelma and Pablo Martinelli

Explorations in Economic History, 2024, vol. 94, issue C

Abstract: This paper studies the effects of various types of land reform on the voting of the rural poor in a developing, largely agrarian economy such as 1930s Spain. Using municipal-level electoral results in a region with intense but heterogeneous land-related interventions, we find that permanent transfers of land had the greatest positive impact on voting for leftist candidates, followed by temporary transfers of land aimed at alleviating the problem of seasonal unemployment. Poorly planned temporary transfers of land without adequate funding for beneficiaries made the landless more vulnerable to landowner control and had the opposite result. Our results show that the secret ballot might be insufficient to guarantee the free vote of economically dependent landless laborers. They also show that land reforms with poor support for beneficiaries might backfire.

JEL-codes: N54 O13 P14 Q10 Q24 Q28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:94:y:2024:i:c:s0014498324000445

DOI: 10.1016/j.eeh.2024.101618

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