Why read Autocracy and Redistribution?

Book cover of Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform

Book description

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? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and more targeted at…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Autocracy and Redistribution as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Scott Mainwaring

Author

What I most admire about Autocracy and Redistribution is that it brings the best of contemporary political science to bear on questions of deep scholarly and real-world importance: what explains redistributive land reform? Albertus argues that redistributive land reform is much more likely when 1) top-level state leaders and large landowners have diverging interests and 2) institutional barriers to achieving large-scale reform are lower. Albertus shows that redistributive land reform is more likely under dictatorship than democracy.

From Scott's list on democracy today from a scholar of democracy.