Состоялось очередное заседание общемосковского научного семинара "Политическая экономика"

Тема доклада: "Vote Suppression and Insecure Property Rights"
Докладчики: Paul Castañeda Dower (NES) and Tobias Pfutze (Oberlin College)

Аннотация:

While it is commonly understood that land is a political tool, there is surprisingly little research on how improvements in land tenure security, such as land certifi cation, a ffect political outcomes. In this paper, we show how a dominant political party can use insecure property rights to ensure politically-compliant voter behavior and how this power is frustrated after the introduction of a land certification program. Without the ability to expropriate land, the party will no longer be able to threaten the opposition to stay away from the ballot box. We test our hypothesis using data on 10,000 Mexican municipal elections during the country's democratic transition. Exploiting the data's panel structure, we find that a large scale land certi fication program that ran in parallel during 1993-2007 had the eff ect of signi ficantly raising turnout for the opposition to the former state party (PRI). Importantly, this effect disappears once the PRI has already lost at least one election in the municipality. We interpret these results as land certifi cation limiting PRI's clientelistic powers. With these results, we contribute to the understanding of the downfall of PRI and, more generally, to the relationship between political power, institutions and resource allocation.

 

Рабочий язык: английский