Land and freedom

• Department of Political and Social Sciences

This session of the Political Behaviour Colloquium features a presentation by Ludwig Schulze, PhD researcher at EUI

Prominent scholarship on authoritarian regime stability presupposes efficient coercive institutions to control citizens. However, as early regimes are often weak, how do autocrats establish power? Under conditions of weakened institutional capacities, this paper argues that autocrats can use redistributive policies to broaden their support base. Importantly, redistribution serves the purpose to effectively co-opt opposition groups. I study the early phase of East Germany’s communist regime, focusing on the 1945 land reform that redistributed land from elites to small farmers. Leveraging the 100-hectare expropriation threshold, I show using a regression discontinuity, instrumental variable and difference-in-differences approach that the reform increased electoral support for the authoritarian Socialist Unity Party (SED) in the competitive

1946 elections. This study contributes to our understanding of authoritarian regime stability, underlining the role of redistribution to establish power in young regimes.

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