Enduring Effects of Disenfranchisement: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Peru

• In Event: Ethnicity, State Capacity, and Democracy in Historical Latin America

Abstract

The decision of states to enforce property rights has been a primary target of analysis in political economy. This article examines a still under-explored question: when do poor and marginalized populations receive access to secure property rights? Our empirical focus is Indigenous populations in Latin America, which have long faced uneven access to secure property rights. Exploiting exogenous variation in land value--as a result of railway construction and relative altitude--and the timing of a national disenfranchisement reform in late nineteenth-century Peru, we show that conflicts over valuable Indigenous land were more likely to occur when Indigenous groups lacked political power. We demonstrate that the state's failure to reliably enforce Indigenous property rights subsequently led these groups to seek alternative forms of defense of their land, including the formation of pan-ethnic organizations in the early twentieth century. We further show that Indigenous groups with valuable land refused state offers of property rights until the franchise was restored in 1979. Our findings have important implications for understanding the causes and consequences of uneven property rights enforcement. Specifically, political power is essential for the defense of valuable land; lacking access to the vote, groups develop substituting, non-electoral forms of mobilization to defend their property rights.

Authors

• Christopher Lee Carter, University of Virginia

• Alvaro Calderon, Stanford University