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Sweetening the Deal: The Political Economy of Land Redistribution in South Africa’s Sugar Sector
Abstract
Under what conditions do land transfers occur under land reform? Theories of land redistribution focus on demand-side explanations for land transfers where the state allocates land in exchange for support from voters or rural elites. In this article, I argue that land transfers under market land redistribution are driven by supply-side characteristics of landholders. Using the case of South Africa’s sugar sector, I show that landholders chose to sell their land via redistribution when they had the economic incentive to preserve existing state-support frameworks and had collective capacity from centralized institutions. To understand when and why land redistribution occurs, one must pay attention to the landholders’ relationship to the state and their internal sectoral organization. In some cases, landholders may have an incentive to redistribute their land.
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The territory once administered by the KwaZulu homeland, roughly 30 per cent of the current province of KwaZulu-Natal, belongs to the Ingonyama Trust. After South Africa’s first democratic elections of 26–28 April 1994, the other nine homelands were integrated into a unitary state. The land they administered came under the authority of the national government. KwaZulu was the only exception. How did 2.8 million hectares end up in a trust with the Zulu king as sole trustee? This article returns to the tense political standoff before the elections to reconstruct the informal negotiations that resulted in the Inkatha Freedom Party’s (IFP) decision to join elections and the transfer of KwaZulu land to the king. The peace deal emerged from a brief reanimation of an old working partnership between Pretoria and traditional authorities in KwaZulu, based on a confluence of interests among National Party conservatives and IFP moderates. Ultimately, the IFP decided to participate without the federalist guarantees it demanded. Instead, the inducement was land for the traditional authorities who formed the backbone of KwaZulu administration. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, this article excavates the Ingonyama Trust’s role in breaking a seemingly unsolvable political deadlock.
Renewable energy transition is one of the keys to mitigating climate change. While attention has been given to various economic, institutional, technological, and sociocultural barriers to this transition, it is unclear how acute interstate conflict shadowed by geopolitical forces shapes the deployment of renewables. The literature is split between those who speculate that conflict conditions discourage renewable energy proliferation and their critics. This ambiguity is surprising, since renewable energy is often suggested as a panacea for many conflict and post-conflict areas with dysfunctional centralised electricity systems. A systematic assessment of these competing hypotheses is challenging because of the absence of reliable data in fragile states and areas. This study is the first to use remote sensing to examine the temporal and spatial diffusion of renewables in the Gaza Strip against the backdrop of conflict conditions with Israel. It finds that Gaza has become a renewable energy leader despite conflict conditions exacerbated by deep poverty. The balance between discouraging and encouraging factors rests on different variables: the impact of the conflict on the free movement of labour, goods, and fuel, the intensity of the conflict, the role of economies of scale, opportunity costs, and alternative energy production costs.
Contrary to populist political discourses, in South Africa the ruling party's approach to land policy is reproducing paternalistic relations that echo apartheid practices and represent the 'colonial present'. This reality stands in stark contrast to the initial aim of land reform, which was conceived as part of a larger project of decolonisation. The latest land redistribution strategy, the Proactive Land Acquisition Strategy, where the state remains the landowner, is no longer consistent with the project of decolonisation. This is because, we argue, land redistribution in South Africa has drifted away from the ideal of social justice; it increasingly displays symptoms of what the 'colonial present' and 'recolonisation'. Party politics, as well as the emergence of a challenge to the ruling party from the left, has prompted a more radical rhetoric, but one that co-exists with deeply conservative practices. This paper argues that the status quo represents a betrayal of the idea of land reform as decolonisation, and that a radical shift in policy and practice is needed in order to align it with a project of decolonisation in South Africa.
The most recent incarnation of South Africa’s land reform is a model of state purchase of farms to be provided on leasehold, rather than transferring title. This briefing presents headline findings from our field research in one district.
In this introductory paper we review historic and contemporary development of sugar cane production across the southern Africa. We argue that the region’s sugar industry provides a useful lens through which to understand current dynamics of corporate capital and agricultural production in Africa. We identify three distinct elements of political-economic analysis: first, the operation of logics of capital investment in different settings; second, the nature of state policies and politics in different national contexts; and third, local processes of production, accumulation and livelihoods, including effects on labour and social differentiation. The paper draws on the empirical cases from seven southern African countries presented in this collection. It highlights the rapid concentration of corporate control by three South African companies over the past decade, but also a diverse set of outcomes contingent on local context. This is particularly evident in the nature of ‘outgrower’ sugar cane production which is found in all cases but constituted in different places by quite different social categories in terms of wealth and scale of production. We argue that common stereotypes of corporate investment as either ‘win–win’ or as a ‘land grab’ rarely apply. Rather, the nature and outcomes of ‘outgrower’ systems needs to be understood as a manifestation of context-specific political-economic relationships between corporate capital, national governments and a variety of local holders of capital, land and labour.
Against a context of declining sugar output in South Africa as a whole, the sugar industry in the Nkomazi Municipality of Mpumalanga Province has increased its share of the South African market. It has achieved this over a period of significant change in ownership, with the transfer of at least 25 per cent of land growing sugar cane into black community ownership through South Africa’s land reform programme. The industry now claims that the majority of land used for sugar cane in Nkomazi is owned by the beneficiaries of land reform. This paper examines the historical and contemporary trajectories of sugar cane production in Nkomazi, focusing particularly on the changing status of production on black-owned land. Among small-scale growers, a crisis in operation and maintenance of irrigation has prompted on the one hand a process of land concentration and ‘accumulation from below’, visible in the emergence of medium-scale growers, and, on the other hand, a move by the sugar milling company to take more direct control of sugar cane growing through rental agreements with small-scale landowners. The latter draws on recent experience of ‘joint-venture’ sugar cane production on land transferred to black ‘community trusts’ under the government’s land restitution programme. The paper argues that the moves to medium- and large-scale farming are consistent with the changing livelihoods and aspirations of black South Africans since the end of apartheid, but also suggests contradictions between the emergence of black capitalist medium-scale farmers on the one hand and extension of corporate control of production on the other. While corporate agriculture offers advantages to some, in particular farm employees and a small number of black-owned contractors, it appears to offer little benefit to the majority of African ‘landowners’ while potentially blocking the further expansion of medium-scale growers.
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.
Comparative democratization scholars have devoted almost no attention to how property rights regimes shape the dynamics of electoral competition. This oversight is particularly problematic in African studies. In sub-Saharan Africa the absence or weakness of secure property rights regimes in the countryside can have powerful consequences for multiparty dynamics. Land can become a patronage resource in ways that ignite destabilizing redistributive conflicts and threaten minority rights. By ignoring the design and character of underlying property regimes—or by assuming that the rules governing property are fixed, neutral, or essentially liberal in character—analysts have overlooked a fundamental source of illiberalism in many of Africa's multiparty systems. Côte d'Ivoire, where land politics have contributed to system-wide political breakdown, serves as a case in point.
This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. The authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatut forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. Although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment.
The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among European coordinated countries. A large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state's construction of its own policy interests and on private actors' goals. Although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. The authors use the cases of Denmark and Germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. The two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the Danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination.
Does the organization of business matter for social policy development in the advanced capitalist democracies? Conventional welfare state analysis has given this significant question scant attention. We argue, however, that the representational power of business, coordination across business interest units, and integration of associations in corporatist policy-making forums, or what we call the social
corporatist
organization
of
business, should result in greater support and participation by employers in social policy formation and implementation. We test our arguments with models both of 1980–98 pooled time-series data on within- and across-country variation in spending on active labor market programs and of extensive firm-level survey data from Denmark and the United Kingdom. We find that the centralization and coordination of employers as well as the integration of employer organizations in corporatist policy-making forums are strongly associated with shares of national income devoted to active labor market policy. We find, moreover, that the degree of employer organization conditions active labor market policy responses to “de-industrialization” and increases in general unemployment. At the firm level, membership in an employer association has a significant positive effect on employer participation in active labor market programs in corporatist Denmark but not in the pluralist United Kingdom.
This paper models balanced-budget redistribution between socio-economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties. Equilibrium is unique in the present model, and a sufficient condition for existence is given, requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate. The validity of Hotelling's principle of minimum differentiation, and of Director's Law, are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions, and voter's possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties. The policy strategy of expected-plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality. Incomes are fixed and known, so lump-sum taxation is feasible. However, constraints on tax/transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis.
This study identifies sources of risk that commercial sugarcane farmers in the province of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, presently perceive to pose the greatest threat to the viability of their businesses. Sugarcane contributes approximately 82% of the income from field crops in KZN, with 72% of the crop planted by large-scale growers. Data obtained in 2006 via structured personal interviews of 76 large-scale sugarcane farmers from a stratified random sample of 110 farmers in two separate mill-supply areas of KZN were used to elicit farmersÂ’ perceptions of various sources of risk. The most important risk sources were found to be the threat posed by land reform, minimum wage legislation and the variability of the sugar price, in that order. Land reform and minimum wage legislation did not feature prominently in past studies of KZN farmers during the 1990s. Factor analysis identified additional risk dimensions that exist within the remaining risk sources. Regional differences between the two study areas were also evident. Recommendations include that government improve accessibility to information regarding future plans for land and labour policies, and that farmers become more proactive in terms of obtaining information to reduce uncertainty and resultant efficiency barriers.
This article examines the evolution of policy recommendations concerning rural land issues since the formulation of the World Bank's "Land Reform Policy Paper" in 1975. That paper set out three guiding principles: the desirability of owner-operated family farms; the need for markets to permit land to be transferred to more productive users; and the importance of an egalitarian asset distribution. In the 25 years since that paper was published, these guiding principles have remained the same, but it is now recognized that communal tenure systems can be more cost-effective than formal title, that titling programs should be judged on their equity as well as their efficiency, that the potential of land rental markets has often been severely underestimated, that land-sale markets enhance efficiency only if they are integrated into a broader effort at developing rural factor markets, and that land reform is more likely to result in a reduction of poverty fit harnesses (rather than undermines) the operation of land markets and is implemented in a decentralized fashion. Achieving land policies that incorporate these elements requires a coherent legal and institutional framework together with greater reliance on pilot programs to examine the applicability of interventions under local conditions. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.
The Paradox of Traditional Chiefs in Democratic Africa shows that unelected traditional leaders can facilitate democratic responsiveness. Ironically, chiefs' undemocratic character gives them a capacity to organize responses to rural problems that elected politicians and state institutions lack. Specifically, chiefs' longer time horizons encourage investment in local institutions that enable the provision of local public goods. This is the paradox of traditional chiefs in democratic Africa: elected politicians can only effectively respond to rural constituents through institutions constructed and maintained by local leaders who are not worried about electoral terms. Furthermore, the critical role played by chiefs in brokering local development projects forces us to reassess how we understand the basis of their political influence during elections. The book examines the effects of traditional leaders on the electoral connection in Africa through a multi-method approach that combines qualitative research, surveys, and experiments, with particular attention to the Zambian case.
Scholarship on African and other developing societies often argues that governments allocate private goods as political patronage, but recent work has called this assumption into question. In this study, I argue that clientelism is a political strategy that emerges only under certain conditions. In a least likely case of land allocation in Kenya, where the literature assumes clientelism to predominate, I ask under what conditions do states distribute resources to fulfil programmatic policy needs versus clientelistic goals? To answer this question, I use a historical process tracing approach that triangulates descriptive data from an original dataset on land allocation programs in Kenya from 1953 until 2017 with archival research and semi-structured interviews. I find that the choice between policy and patronage depends on two domestic conditions: a) the interaction between national political competition and regime type and b) the state’s ability to control resources vis-a-vis local competitors. In an authoritarian regime, competition is conducive to clientelism, but in a democratic regime, competition may well produce programmatic policy, while local actors’ challenges to centralized resource allocation reduce a government’s ability to use clientelism and favor programmatic allocation as ruling elites struggle to control resource allocation for their own political ends. I conclude that the allocation of rights to land in Kenya demonstrates that politics in developing countries occurs in a hybrid neopatrimonial system rather than a purely patronage-based one, in which changes in politics can alter how a government distributes resources. This has ramifications for how scholars and practitioners must rethink questions of property rights, corruption, political linkages and development in many countries where we assume that private goods are allocated on a clientelistic logic.
Under what conditions are governments able to liberalize labor markets? I leverage the cases of Portugal and Spain, two countries hit by the Eurozone crisis and constrained in their policy options, that diverge in the key measure mandated by international creditors to recover—the decentralization of collective bargaining. Against the common assumption that the liberalization of labor is widely embraced by capital, I show that governments are only able to advance labor reforms when there is a leading industrial export sector that benefits from it and provides a powerful domestic social partner. I test this argument with in-depth qualitative data collected during twelve months of fieldwork in both countries, including 129 interviews with politicians, policy-makers, and members of business associations and labor confederations, among others.
Colonial powers typically organized economic activity in the colonies to maximize their economic returns. While the literature has emphasized long-run negative economic impacts via institutional quality, the changes in economic organization implemented to spur production historically could also directly influence economic organization in the long-run, exerting countervailing effects. We examine these in the context of the Dutch Cultivation System, the integrated industrial and agricultural system for producing sugar that formed the core of the Dutch colonial enterprise in 19th century Java. We show that areas close to where the Dutch established sugar factories in the mid-19th century are today more industrialized, have better infrastructure, are more educated, and are richer than nearby counterfactual locations that would have been similarly suitable for colonial sugar factories. We also show, using a spatial regression discontinuity design on the catchment areas around each factory, that villages forced to grow sugar cane have more village-owned land and also have more schools and substantially higher education levels, both historically and today. The results suggest that the economic structures implemented by colonizers to facilitate production can continue to promote economic activity in the long run, and we discuss the contexts where such effects are most likely to be important.
Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners have historically repressed agricultural workers and sustained autocracy. What might change landowning elites’ preferences for dictatorship and reduce their opposition to democracy? Change requires reducing landowners’ need to maintain political control over labor. This transition occurs when mechanization reduces the demand for agricultural workers, eliminating the need for labor-repressive policies. We explain how the adoption of labor-saving technology in agriculture alters landowners’ political preferences for different regimes, so that the more mechanized the agricultural sector, the more likely is democracy to emerge and survive. Our theoretical argument offers a parsimonious revision to Moore’s thesis that applies to the global transformation of agriculture since his Social Origins first appeared, and results from our cross-national statistical analyses strongly suggest that a positive relationship between agricultural mechanization and democracy does in fact exist.
We construct a unique, extensive dataset that codifies 372 major land reform enactments in 165 countries during the period 1900–2010 and classifies them as those with several different motives. Exploiting the geographic and time variation in land reforms and political transitions across the globe over more than a century, we find that democratic transitions are linked with a greater likelihood of land reforms of the pro-poor type as well as those with different inequality-reducing motives. These results are robust to adding important controls, changing variable definitions, using alternative data, addressing endogeneity to the extent possible, and moving from enactments to implementations. We also estimate a positive impact of autocratic transitions on pro-poor and some inequality-reducing land reforms, but these results emerge mainly with instrumental-variables estimation. We also show that a leftward shift in the political ideology of the chief executive is associated with a higher likelihood of pro-poor land reforms as well as a few types of inequality-reducing ones.
Land registration and titling in Africa is often advocated as a pro-poor legal empowerment strategy. Advocates have put forth different visions of the substantive goals this is to achieve. Some see registration and titling as a way to protect smallholders’ rights of access to land. Others frame land registration as part of community-protection or ethno-justice agendas. Still others see legal empowerment in the market-enhancing commodification of property rights. This paper contrasts these different visions, showing that each entails tensions and trade-offs. The analysis helps explain why land law reforms aiming at legal empowerment may be controversial or divisive in African countries.
Traditional leaders are often given subnational authority in developing democracies. Although ubiquitous, the electoral consequences of their power have received little attention, often due to empirical challenges. We argue that traditional leaders, whose power and resources largely depend on the state, have incentives to support incumbent political parties who can guarantee their survival and provide them with rents. We study this quid pro quo in the former Bantustans of South Africa, showing that an alignment between the incumbent African National Congress and chiefs maps to increased electoral support for the party. Our results suggest that chiefs boost African National Congress vote share by between 6.6 and 8.2 percentage points in the Bantustans, translating into a change in the national vote of between 2 and 2.5 percentage points. Our empirical strategy rules out that our results are driven by differences in ethnicity, race, or economic circumstances, which commonly confound the presence of traditional authorities.
This article examines the effect of customary institutions on smallholder land titling in Sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the individual’s status within the customary institution conditions his or her demand for land titles. Individuals with greater customary privilege gain advantages from maintaining customary property rights, including stronger tenure security. For households with lower privilege within the customary institution, the benefits of adopting state land titles are higher. Analysis of an original survey of smallholder farmers in Senegal and an existing survey in Zambia demonstrates that households with greater customary privilege are less likely to adopt state land titles, independent of ethnicity, wealth, and land values. I find additional support for the argument in measures of increased tenure security for those with greater customary privilege. Qualitative interviews with customary authorities and smallholder farmers help establish the mechanism. These findings update the dominant wisdom that land values and material transaction costs drive smallholder land titling, demonstrating the important effect of status within the customary institution on demand for land titles. By examining the political underpinnings of customary property rights, this article contributes to our understandings of which farmers benefit most from land titling. This has implications for the improved design of land governance programs.
This paper examines post-exceptionalism in US food and agriculture policy. Using data on lobbying activity and campaign contributions, we find that corporations and organizations representing the banking industry, manufacturers of agricultural inputs, food processors, and the retail food sector allocate significant financial resources trying to influence food and agriculture policy. Although traditional peak associations of farmers and organizations representing the growers of specific commodities remain an important constituency in policy debates, agriculture is no longer a compartmentalized policy domain dominated by producer interests. Instead, food and agriculture resemble other domains of US policy in which corporations and trade associations leverage advantages in money and personnel to protect their bottom line.
Are large landowners, especially those engaged in labor-dependent agriculture, detrimental to democratization and the subsequent survival of democracy? This assumption is at the heart of both canonical and recent influential work on regime transition and durability. Using an original panel data set on the extent of labor-dependent agriculture in countries across the world since 1930, the author finds that labor-dependent agriculture was indeed historically bad for democratic stability and stunted the extension of suffrage, 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 more reliably over the long term than could 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.
Qualitative and multimethod scholars face a wide and often confusing array of alternatives for case selection using the results of a prior regression analysis. Methodologists have recommended alternatives including selection of typical cases, deviant cases, extreme cases on the independent variable, extreme cases on the dependent variable, influential cases, most similar cases, most different cases, pathway cases, and randomly sampled cases, among others. Yet this literature leaves it substantially unclear which of these approaches is best for any particular goal. Via statistical modeling and simulation, I argue that the rarely considered approach of selecting cases with extreme values on the main independent variable, as well as the more commonly discussed deviant case design, are the best alternatives for a broad range of discovery-related goals. By contrast, the widely discussed and advocated typical case, extreme-on-Y, and most similar cases approaches to case selection are much less valuable than scholars in the qualitative and multimethods research traditions have recognized to date.
Research on the economic origins of democracy and dictatorship has shifted away from the impact of growth and turned toward the question of how different patterns of growth - equal or unequal - shape regime change. This book offers a new theory of the historical relationship between economic modernization and the emergence of democracy on a global scale, focusing on the effects of land and income inequality. Contrary to most mainstream arguments, Ben W. Ansell and David J. Samuels suggest that democracy is more likely to emerge when rising, yet politically disenfranchised, groups demand more influence because they have more to lose, rather than when threats of redistribution to elite interests are low.
Post-apartheid South African elections have borne an unmistakable racial imprint: Africans vote for one set of parties, whites support a different set of parties, and with few exceptions, there is no crossover voting between groups. These voting tendencies have solidified the dominance of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) over South African politics and turned South African elections into “racial censuses.” This book explores the political sources of these outcomes. It argues that although the beginnings of these patterns lie in South Africa's past, in the effects apartheid had on voters’ beliefs about race and destiny and the reputations parties forged during this period, the endurance of the census reflects the ruling party's ability to use the powers of office to prevent the opposition from evolving away from its apartheid-era party label. By keeping key opposition parties “white,” the ANC has rendered them powerless, solidifying its hold on power in spite of an increasingly restive and dissatisfied electorate.
The rise in inequality has been explained with reference to organized groups and the lobbying of the financial sector. This article argues that the image of politics as organized combat is contradicted by empirical evidence on lobbying in the United States, and does not travel well to Europe. The power of finance does not operate through organized political influence. Rather, politics in the interest of capital unfolds as a structural feature of advanced economies over time. Tellingly, at the height of the financial crisis, one of the most promising strategies of institutions seeking government support was not organizing for combat, but collective inaction. Our challenge, then, is to explain how the power of finance has built up and is playing out in creating inequality. A more structural, less agency-focused perspective highlights how the rise of finance has been supported by actors that few would accuse of being finance-friendly, such as the European center-left parties and consumers. Reconceptualizing the power of finance has important implications for political solutions to rising inequality.
The sugar industry was established in Natal in the mid-nineteenth century. By the 1980s, South Africa produced c. 2 million metric tons of sugar per annum and, directly or indirectly, the industry supported almost one million people. Exports, which amounted for almost half the sugar produced in the 1970s, declined during the 1980s and low prices together with American and Canadian sanctions have forced the industry to consider alternative uses for sugar cane.
This article discusses traditional leadership laws that entrench the ‘tribal’ boundaries which make up the former homelands, and recent policies that foreclose landownership for the majority of rural people. I argue that these laws and policies reinforce, rather than address, the legacy of the 1913 and 1936 Land Acts. Distorted constructs of unilateral chiefly power are mobilised in attempts to create a separate legal zone of customary authority that undermines the citizenship rights of those living within the boundaries of the former bantustans. The article points to tensions between the new policies and the Constitution's promise of land rights to remedy past discrimination, discussing restitution as a case in point. The example of platinum mining on communal land in North West Province is used to illustrate the significant resources at stake.
Why would politicians give up power over the allocation of resources to community leaders? This article examines why many African governments have ceded power over the allocation of land to unelected traditional leaders. In contrast to the existing literature, which suggests that traditional leaders' power is a historical holdover that has not been eliminated due to weak state capacity, I argue that African political leaders often choose to cede power to traditional leaders as a means of mobilizing electoral support from non-coethnics. I find support for this argument using a new subnational dataset that includes approximately 180 regions in eighteen African countries. The cross-sectional analysis is complemented by case studies of the dynamics of the devolution of power to traditional chiefs.
The authors argue that the organization of employers shapes social policy support among firms and, in turn, affects social policy outcomes. Specifically, the authors argue that the centralization and cohesion of employer groups and economic cooperation across enterprises positively affects social welfare provision. Empirically, the authors assess the impacts of business organization on social welfare effort in 15 developed democracies between the 1970s and 1990s; the authors also provide analysis of the impact of employer organization on active labor market policy. The authors find that the organization of employers is one of the most important determinants of overall social welfare effort. The authors also find that employer organization affects the development of active labor market policies, and it influences the degree to which social democratic parties pursue active labor market programs. The authors conclude with a discussion of the findings' implications for theories of social corporatism and the welfare state.
Recent cross-national studies have returned their attention to the structural determinants of political regimes, highlighting in particular the factor of as a decisive barrier to democratization. This article provides the first systematic test of such hypotheses at the microlevel and proposes a new account of authoritarianism's durability by examining the crucial case of pre–World War I Prussia. The article analyzes the results of a roll-call vote on a watershed piece of legislation that was defeated on the eve of World War I—legislation that would have democratized suffrage rules in Germany's largest state. When examined systematically, this historically and theoretically important vote reveals two surprising lessons: first, landholding inequality undercuts the prospects of democratization even holding income inequality constant. Second, the nature of elite competition and electoral considerations, shaped by the institutional configuration of nondemocratic regimes, can also thwart democratization, even when socioeconomic conditions may appear to make a society ripe for regime change.
This article considers the question of land demand and land reform in relation to traditional authorities in KwaZulu Natal. The article has three sections. The first section analyses the current status and position of traditional leaders in the province. This provides a background for the second section, which appraises the attitudes of traditional leaders and their councils to the status quo and to future land reform and land management. The attitudes and opinions appraised emerged in workshops and in‐depth interviews conducted with traditional leaders between August 1994 and January 1995 in the two district study areas selected as provincial research sites for the Land Reform Research Project. These districts are the Estcourt‐Weenen area (also the site of the province's Land Reform Pilot Project) and the Mhlatuze catchment. In Estcourt‐Weenen, a central issue is the relationship of the traditional authorities to the community trusts which have been established to acquire and administer new land. In the Mhlatuze catchment, the role of the traditional authorities in relation to an emerging commercial smallholder agriculture is central. Conditions in both districts could present a challenge to the authority and power of traditional leaders. The third section of the article considers the implications of the present position of traditional leaders and their views and attitudes for future land reform programmes. The research was commissioned by the Land and Agricultural Policy Centre and funded by DANIDA. Our use of the terms ‘traditional leader’ and ‘traditional authority’ is in line with the legal terminology outlined in the interim constitution, and does not constitute a normative judgement on the leaders or authorities concerned.
When South Africa's land reform programme finally reached rural Umbumbulu, a potential for conflict over land emerged unexpectedly. Strategically located near a major urban centre, residents of this region have long relied on wages and social welfare grants. Land was valued primarily for residential security and as a symbolic representation of community membership, rather than for productive purposes. This emphasis on community membership, however, created the potential for conflict when a local chief challenged a civil society group over their authority to claim land. With the government's continued hesitancy to challenge the authority of chiefs, land reform provided an opportunity for local chiefs to reinforce their position and potentially to expand the amount of land under their jurisdiction. This agenda conflicted both with the government's interest in developing commercial agriculture and local residents’ desire for rural land as security in the context of high levels of unemployment.
This paper seeks an explanation of the limited success of land reforms in redistributing land in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, in spite of their widespread implementation. A rational choice model of farmer behavior incorporating transaction costs on labor and credit, and a game-theoretical approach between landlords and the state are used for that purpose. We show that land reform failed to be redistributive because it sought to first modernize large farms, which allowed landlords to reinforce their power over the state. This, in turn, enabled them either to obtain credible commitments of nonexpropriation if they would modernize, or to successfully use rent seeking to externalize the cost of modernization and make expropriation with compensation no longer feasible.
The paper describes background, initial experience, and future challenges associated with a new “negotiated” approach to land reform. This approach has emerged as, following the end of the Cold War and broad macroeconomic adjustment, many countries face a “second generation” of reforms to address deep-rooted structural problems and provide the basis for sustainable poverty reduction and economic growth. It reviews possible theoretical links—through credit market or political channels—between asset ownership and economic performance. Program characteristics in each country, as well as lessons for implementation, and implications for monitoring and impact assessment are discussed.
As the experience of the 20th century has shown, implementing policies that increase agricultural productivity among smallholders is a particularly promising strategy to achieve pro-poor growth. However, history also reveals major political challenges to adopting this strategy. The paper compares the experience of Asian countries that were able to launch a smallholder-based Green Revolution with the experience of African countries that are still struggling with this goal. It then reviews the political economy literature to identify the factors that account for these divergent experiences. Finally, the paper develops a conceptual framework to guide empirical research to close the knowledge gaps identified by the review.
It is typically assumed that African leaders enact policies that benefit their ethnoregional group using all types of patronage. Crop production and political power are geographically concentrated in many African countries, and this paper exploits this overlap to cast doubt on this conventional wisdom. It shows, using data on 50 country-crop combinations, that cash crop farmers who are ethnically identified with the head of state face higher taxes. Furthermore, democratic regimes impose lower taxes. This paper shows that farmers who have few alternatives face higher taxes. African leaders have used local intermediaries to exert control over the countryside and to ensure that farmers do not support alternative candidates It suggests that as leaders are better at selecting and monitoring these intermediaries in their home areas, they can extract more from the majority at home than abroad using taxes on cash crops, which are regionally but not individually targetable.
This book addresses several of the classic questions in African Studies. In the pre-colonial era what were the sources of order in societies without states? And what were the origins of 'traditional' states in Africa? In the colonial period, what caused the divergent patterns of agricultural development? And what were the issues that drove the peasantry into the rebellions which brought an end to colonial rule? Since independence what has been the fate of the African peasantry? What has been the content of the agricultural policies adopted by the governments of Africa? And how can these policies be accounted for? In answering these questions, the book explores various forms of explanation and advances a form of political economy based upon rational-choice analysis.
The political process often compensates the losers from technical change or international competition in an economically inefficient way, namely by subsidizing or protecting declining industries instead of encouraging the movement of resources to other more productive uses. We find that a dynamic inconsistency in the game of redistributive politics contributes to this outcome. To achieve economically efficient outcomes, it is necessary that those making economically inefficient choices are not given offsetting transfers. But the political process distributes income on the basis of political characteristics, which are in general different from the economic characteristics that are rewarded by the market. We identify circumstances in which the inefficient choosers have desirable political characteristics, and therefore are immune from threats of having to face the economic consequences of their choices.
This paper offers a new explanation for why some governments consistently impose such high agricultural tax rates that their revenues decline, and consistently spend what tax revenue they have on things other than productive public investments such as agricultural R&D. We propose an intertemporal political economy model, in which taxes and R&D levels are set in a repeated game between government and producers. Panel data from Africa sustain the hypothesis that high sunk costs in production are potential targets of predatory taxation, making it timeinconsistent for governments to announce low-tax, high-investment policies. Thus there is persistent stagnation, with high tax rates and little investment, until new production techniques reduce fixed costs or new policymaking institutions allow credible commitments to a low-tax, high-investment regime. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Phil Pardey for sharing data on agricultural R&D, and to USAID’s collaborative agreement on Equity and Growth through Economic Research (EAGER) for financial support.
Political Bias in Venezuela's Land Reform Under Chávez
- Michael Albertus
Michael Albertus, "The Role of Subnational Politicians in Distributive Politics: Political Bias in Venezuela's Land Reform Under Chávez," Comparative Political Studies, 48
(November 2015b), 1667-710, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414015600457; Catherine Boone, "Electoral Populism where Property Rights Are Weak: Land Politics in Contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa," Comparative
Politics, 41 (January 2009), 183-201;
Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in
- Beatriz Magaloni
Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and Its Demise in Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).