Land Power

​For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. Land Power shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment. 
 
Modern history has been defined by land reallocation on a massive scale. From the 1500s on, European colonial powers and new nation-states shifted indigenous lands into the hands of settlers. The 1900s brought new waves of land appropriation, from Soviet and Maoist collectivization to initiatives turning large estates over to family farmers. The shuffle continues today as governments vie for power and prosperity by choosing who should get land. Drawing on a career’s worth of original research and on-the-ground fieldwork, Albertus shows that choices about who owns the land have locked in poverty, sexism, racism, and climate crisis—and that what we do with the land today can change our collective fate. 
 
Global in scope, Land Power argues that saving civilization must begin with the earth under our feet.
“Land Power is an important book dealing with a timeless but underappreciated issue: who owns the land. It illuminates how social hierarchies and injustice have been historically built around unfair land rights and provides a fascinating array of examples of how reshuffling land can help tackle these pressing issues.”
 
​– Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents
“‘Land’—Four simple letters. Four enormous impacts: on racial divides, gender inequality, the struggle for development, and our precarious environment. In this powerful and compelling book, Michael Albertus re-invents how to think about that most simple but profound force shaping our lives—the ground beneath us.”
 
​– Ben Ansell, author of Why Politics Fails
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Property Without Rights

A new understanding of the causes and consequences of incomplete property rights in countries across the world
Property Without Rights is motivated by a puzzling and consequential fact: major land reform programs have reallocated property in more than one-third of the world's countries in the last century and impacted over one billion people, but only rarely granted beneficiaries complete property rights. Why is this the case and what are the consequences? This book draws on wide-ranging original data and charts new conceptual terrain to reveal the political origins of the property rights gap. It shows that land reform programs are most often implemented by authoritarian governments that deliberately withhold property rights from beneficiaries. In so doing, governments generate coercive leverage over rural populations and exert social control. This is politically advantageous to ruling governments but it has negative development consequences: it slows economic growth, productivity, and urbanization and it exacerbates inequality. The book also examines the conditions under which subsequent governments close property rights gaps, usually as a result of democratization or foreign pressure.​
"This book explains where missing property rights in land emerge, what they imply for inequality and poverty, and how they can be overcome. This is first-rate social science that should inform modern debates on development and policy."
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​– Daron Acemoglu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
"In this landmark study, based on more than a decade of intrepid fieldwork and imaginative analysis of the most comprehensive dataset on rural property rights ever assembled, Michael Albertus systematically unravels the great puzzle of why so many states fail to provide secure property rights over land to their citizens. This pathbreaking book convincingly exposes the political motives that lead governments to open and maintain wide gaps in property rights, and that induce democracies to close them."                                                                                                                 – Larry Diamond, Stanford University
"This outstanding book makes the case for understanding why governments distribute land but not secure property rights to rural dwellers. These property rights gaps are of great consequence throughout the developing world. Yet they are poorly understood. Whereas these gaps are often attributed to misguided policy or state weakness, Albertus makes a compelling case that they are rooted in political choices, often aimed at sustaining autocracy. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of rights and redistribution."                – Steven Levitsky, Harvard University
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Authoritarianism and the
​Elite Origins of Democracy

A retelling of the origins of democracy around the globe that puts elites front and center
Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy, coauthored with Victor Menaldo, explores the origins of democracy and the impact that autocratic legacies have after democratization. It makes the case that, in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens, democracy often does not reset the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. This landmark study systematically documents and analyzes the constitutional tools that outgoing authoritarian elites use to accomplish these ends, such as electoral system design, legislative appointments, federalism, legal immunities, constitutional tribunal design, and supermajority thresholds for change. It provides wide-ranging evidence for these claims using data that spans the globe and dates from 1800 to the present. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy also explains why some democracies have been able to successfully overhaul their elite-biased constitutions to found more egalitarian social contracts, and in doing so, provides a blueprint for modern democracies that seek a new beginning. ​
"In this important and original study, Albertus and Menaldo help answer a critical question for comparative politics - why do democratic transitions so often fail to eliminate elite dominance of a country’s politics? Their conclusions will be of interest to a very wide range of scholars."

​– David Stasavage, New York University
"Albertus and Menaldo offer an audacious set of claims supported with rigorous and rich comparative and historical research. Democracy’s success (or failure) depends not on the people but on the competition among elites. The origins of nearly all democracies are in elite bargains, renegotiations among elites are generally what sustain democracy, and the failure of elites to reach agreements is what dooms them. Thus, it should be no surprise that inequality is generally part and parcel of democratic polities and that authoritarianism is often a short step away. This exciting reinterpretation of the historical record offers a new perspective on the problems confronting contemporary governments."                               – Margaret Levi, Stanford University
"With this powerful new view of the origins and success of democracy, developed through a wide array of convincing historical and statistical analysis, the authors fundamentally reshape the way we think about elites and democracy."                                                                         – Ben Ansell, University of Oxford
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​Book reviews in Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Democratization, Humanities and Social Sciences Online

Coercive Distribution

Challenges existing accounts of authoritarian distribution and introduces an alternative, supply-side, and state-centered theory of coercive distribution
Canonical theories of political economy struggle to explain patterns of distribution in authoritarian regimes. In Coercive Distribution, Albertus, Fenner, and Slater challenge existing models and introduce an alternative, supply-side, and state-centered theory of 'coercive distribution'. Authoritarian regimes proactively deploy distributive policies as advantageous strategies to consolidate their monopoly on power. These policies contribute to authoritarian durability by undercutting rival elites and enmeshing the masses in lasting relations of coercive dependence. The authors illustrate the patterns, timing, and breadth of coercive distribution with global and Latin American quantitative evidence and with a series of historical case studies from regimes in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. By recognizing distribution's coercive dimensions, they account for empirical patterns of distribution that do not fit with quasi-democratic understandings of distribution as quid pro quo exchange. Under authoritarian conditions, distribution is less an alternative to coercion than one of its most effective expressions.
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Autocracy and Redistribution

A landmark new understanding of land reform 
When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? Conventional wisdom dating back to Aristotle holds that redistribution should be both higher and more targeted at the poor under democracy. But comprehensive historical data to test this claim has been lacking. Autocracy and Redistribution shows that land redistribution – the most consequential form of redistribution in the developing world – occurs more often under dictatorship than democracy. It offers a novel theory of land reform and develops a new typology of land reform policies. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival work, Albertus leverages original data spanning the world and dating back to 1900 to comprehensively test the theory. The findings call for rethinking much of the common wisdom about redistribution and regimes.
"This book is an exceptional achievement. It is an outstanding contribution to the literatures on land redistribution, democracies and dictatorships, political economy, and Latin American politics."

– Scott Mainwaring, University of Notre Dame
"Albertus' book is a must-read for understanding distributive politics in Latin America and beyond. Without doubt, it will become a reference in comparative studies of development and distributive politics."

​– M. Victoria Murillo, Columbia University
"A great paradox of modern political life is that concentrated landed wealth is a great frozen ice cap blocking the emergence of modern democracy and development. Yet, democracies themselves seem less capable of implementing land reform than autocracies. In this careful and ambitious study, Michael Albertus untangles these puzzles, constructing the most comprehensive cross-national and historical dataset on land reform alongside carefully crafted case studies. The result is an argument that provides the most compelling political theory of land reform to date that has broad implications for the study of democracy, redistribution and autocracy."                                                                                                                                     – Daniel Ziblatt, Harvard University
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