doi 10.1515/bejeap-2012-0044 BEJEAP 2013; 14(1): 31–72 Contributions Felipe González* Can Land Reform Avoid a Left Turn? Evidence from Chile after the Cuban Revolution Abstract: Following the creation of the Alliance for Progress in 1961, several structural reforms were implemented in Latin America in response to the poli- tical effects of the Cuban Revolution. Among these, land reform was arguably the most important policy. Using a unique dataset of land expropriations, and a plausible exogenous variation in land concentration, this paper studies the causal effects this policy had on political support for the incumbent party in the central government. In a context where the incumbent was losing political support (and the power of the left wing was rising), municipalities affected by land reform voted by 3–5 percentage points higher for the incumbent than municipalities not affected by this process. Although it did not prevent the first democratically elected Marxist government, land reform decreased the political support for the left wing party. I discuss several theoretical mechanisms that can explain this empirical result. Keywords: land reform, political outcomes, land concentration *Corresponding author: Felipe González, Department of Economics, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Economic History and Cliometrics Lab (EH Clio Lab); E-mail:
[email protected] 1 Introduction During the Punta del Este Conference in 1961 and via consensus of all Latin American governments, the Alliance for Progress was born. One of the main objectives of this alliance was transform historically unequal agrarian struc- tures (Huerta 1989, p.14). To accomplish this and other goals, several loans and aid programs were granted to Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Chile, among others (Taffet 2007, see Table 3.1).