Land tenure inequality, harvests, and rural conflict ... - e-Archivo

significant. In addition, the sample of closely contested elections suggests using the
sample that considers all elections overestimates the impact of municipal socialism on
strikes. For example, I get a negative and now significant coefficient in the case of
strikes. I cannot reject the null hypothesis that municipal Socialism did not explain
strike levels (and also collective trespassing levels).
9. Conclusions
In development economics, opportunity cost and grievance theories have become the
predominant approach to study conflict in developing societies. This paper studies
one of the most intense and destabilizing processes of peasant mobilization and
conflict in interwar Europe. For the 1930s, it is considered rural conflict was
particularly acromonious in areas with unequal distribution of land ownership, in light
with an interpretation of Spanish modern history that puts large estates and the
unequal distribution of land as one of the main obstacles of political and economic
modernization.
In this paper, however, I show that “ecological” correlations using regional or
provincial means disappear once I exploit local variation in the amount of local land
held by large estates. Moreover, conflict in 1930s Andalusia has been associated with
the poverty and exploitation of landless laborers, especially those living in towns
specializing in wheat and/or olives, who remained unemployed for several months in
the year. Yet, I show conflict clustered in fast growing towns, which were close to
large urban centres and were integrated into national agricultural markets. Local
Socialist power did not matter for the latter, as many of the most vibrant towns in
Seville or Córdoba displayed a historical preference for anarcho-syndicalism or
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