Date Published:
Jul 1, 2008
Abstract:
Does landholding inequality block democratization? This classic
question in the study of political regimes concerned Alexis de Tocqueville,
Max Weber, and Alexander Gerschenkron. It is also a question
that has recently attracted the attention of leading “new structural”
political economists interested in the sources of regime change. Echoing
Gerschenkron’s evocatively titled
Bread and Democracy in Germany, these scholars have returned to the question of how preindustrial patterns
of inequality—namely,
landholding inequality—might exert an
enduring and underappreciated effect on the chances for democratic
transitions.3 The new literature utilizes the most advanced tools of political
economy to examine historical and contemporary cases of democratization,
generating competing accounts of how the preexisting
distribution and mobility of economic resources affect regime change.
Notes:
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