Insuring Against Democracy: The Political Economy of Premodern Elites’ Asset Portfolio Diversification
Does land inequality undermine democratization and development? The dominant consensus is that land inequality provides incentives for landed elites to block democratization and undermines the provision of public goods. Two key assumptions underlie these theoretical accounts: that landowners identify uniquely with land-related activities and that asset mobility is exogenous. In this paper, I propose an alternative explanation on how land inequality affects landed elites' calculations on both democracy and the provision of public goods that breaks with these assumptions.