Landholding inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies: Theoretical framework, research design and preliminary findings

Disputes over the right to use land and the type of land use often occur in advanced democracies. In the UK, the successful lawsuit of Dartmoor’s sixth largest landowner to eliminate wild camping on Dartmoor National Park triggered protests and an ongoing political debate about the scope of the right to roam. In Italy, a recent law that introduced public competitions for the commercial use of beaches set off strong reactions both by the current owners of private beach establishments and by groups opposed to the principle of paid access to the beach. Surprisingly, however, the current distribution of landownership is almost invisible in the contemporary comparative political economy (CPE) literature on the Global North. There is an implicit assumption that because of the decline of the economic importance of agriculture, the allocation of property rights in land is no longer politically significant in advanced democracies. This paper challenges this assumption. Several sectors in advanced economies use large areas of land as a production factor, including not only agriculture, but also tourism, manufacturing, and wholesale and retail trade. The landholding distribution shapes the local organisation of those sectors. The paper develops a theory linking landholding inequality in productive sectors to occupational structure and production profile at the local level, and through those mechanisms, to local communities’ political preferences. In areas with high land concentration, land-intensive sectors will likely be organised around a small number of large firms. In terms of occupational structure, such areas will therefore have larger pools of low-skilled, low-paid workers. In contrast, areas with dispersed landownership will have a larger number of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). In terms of production profile, areas with high land concentration will utilise their efficiency advantage to specialise in commodity production. In contrast, areas with dispersed landownership will produce a greater variety of niche products at a smaller scale. These structural differences are expected to affect political preferences along both the left-right and the cosmopolitan-nationalist dimensions. The paper outlines a mixed-methods research design to test the hypotheses derived from this theoretical framework. It also presents preliminary findings from a comparison between Greece and Spain, which are usually considered similar political economies, but which have a substantial, overlooked difference in terms of landholding inequality. While Greece developed as a country of smallholders since its independence, Southern Spain in particular has witnessed large landholding inequalities since the Reconquest. This difference is reflected in bigger plot sizes and higher land inequality in contemporary Spain than in Greece. The paper examines the consequences of the difference in the landholding distribution in these otherwise similar political economies. By focusing attention on the economic and political consequences of the allocation of property rights in land in advanced democracies, this paper, which is part of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship project at Oxford’s Department of Politics and International Relations, contributes a novel CPE perspective to global debates about land policy, helping to uncover the long-term political economic consequences of decisions about implementing or failing to implement land reform.