Landowners and democracy in Latin America

November 14, 2018 12:00PM E53-482, Millikan Room

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP using this link so we can get a head count for food as well as any dietary restrictions you may have.

WHO: Belén Fernández Milmanda is a Ph D. candidate in Government at Harvard University. Her dissertation investigates how agrarian elites organize to influence policy making in Latin American democracies. She compares landowners' electoral strategies to block redistributive threats in Argentina, Brazil and Chile since the Third Wave democratic transitions.

WHAT: Harvesting Influence: Landowners and Democracy in Latin America.

How do agrarian elites protect themselves from redistribution under democracy? Prominent scholarship in comparative politics argues that landowners oppose democratization because the fixed nature of their assets makes them more vulnerable to expropriation. However, these theories overlook landowners’ capacity to organize politically and use democratic institutions to their advantage. I present a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully blocked redistributive policies in democratic Brazil: a multi-party congressional caucus. Contra earlier work, the Brazilian case shows that economic elites can gain electoral representation in the absence of a strong conservative party. Through an analysis of the Bancada Ruralista, I study the factors explaining agrarian elites’ decision to enter the electoral arena as well as the determinants of their electoral strategies. I argue that agrarian elites' strategies of political influence are shaped by two factors: (1) the level of threat they perceive; and (2) their degree of political fragmentation at the local level. Empirically, I test this argument through process tracing. Theoretically, I argue that this multi-party strategy is better suited for interest group political representation in contexts of high party fragmentation and ideologically loose parties.

Latin American Working Group