Legacies of land inequality and political conflicte : Evidence from 1930s Catalonia

Abstract

What effect does land inequality have on preferences for redistribution? Do past labour mobilizations affect voting behaviour? After years of elite-driven autocratic competition, Spain became a liberal democracy in 1931, and free and fair elections were celebrated for the first time. We discuss two possible outcomes of land inequality in voting for the left, after reviewing two confronting theories, based upon redistributivist models and social control respectively. We are also checking what is the effect of labour mobilisation, using a brand new dataset with fine-grained information on all the recorded strikes in the Barcelona province at the municipal level. Using OLS regressions and an Instrumental Variable approach with taxes paid by the textile industries we find small-to-moderate and positive durable effects of land inequality and labour mobilisation in the elections during the Spanish Second Republic. Finally, we dig into the mechanism by exploiting the surge of labour unrest during the first world war, and look for the effects of land inequality and labour mobilizations on turnout.