Vote Suppression and Insecure Property Rights
Abstract: This paper addresses the question how insecure property rights over a large immovable and discrete asset, such as land or dwellings, affect political outcomes. We argue that the authorities that hold some discretionary control of the asset’s allocation can use their power as a threat to suppress political support for their opponents, but not as a reward for politically compliant behavior. We show this result formally by means of a standard voting model that allows for clientelistic arrangements. We support our argument empirically by the analysis of over 10,000 Mexican municipal elections during the country’s democratic transition. Taking advantage of the data’s panel structure, we show that a large scale land certification program that ran in parallel during 1993-2007 had the effect of significantly raising turnout for the opposition to the former state party (PRI), thereby increasing the odds that the latter will lose power. This effect disappears once the PRI has lost an election at the municipal level for the first time, and hence its clientelistic powers. An important aspect of the land certification program is that it only handed out titles over pre-existing usage rights, making them enforceable by a third party without altering them de-jure. Our results are robust to the imposition of fixed effects on the first differences and instrumental variable specifications.
