Land invasions and land reform in Basilicata, Italy: an evaluation of place-based policies

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the political economy that characterized the design and implementation of a particular place-based policy aimed at addressing wealth inequality, that is, land reform. It focuses on Basilicata in the Italian south, where massive land invasions took place between December 1949 and March 1950 in reaction to long-lasting and extreme inequality. The invading peasants were solicited and even coordinated by local Communist Party leaders. Empirical analysis shows that land invasions were driven not only by the concentration of land ownership but also by the strength of the Communist Party. Furthermore, towns that had experienced land invasions were more likely to be affected by the agrarian reform, and that this policy was more intense in those towns. The results are interpreted as evidence that land ownership was the object of a clear consolidation strategy by the Communist Party and of issue ownership competition with the subsequent implementation of land reform.

KEYWORDS:

• land inequality
• land reform
• political economy
• place-based policies

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Interestingly, by observing land riots during the 1960s and 1970s, another strand of the literature has argued that inequality does not cause riots and civil wars per se; rather, frustration and discontent or the destabilization of the traditional social system are necessary conditions for peasant insurgencies (Gurr, 1971; Paige, 1975; Peterson, 2001; Scott, 1976). According to this view, the concept of land inequality is substituted by the concept of ‘land maldistribution’, which postulates that it is the discrepancy between the actual distribution of land and what peasants think to be a ‘fair’ distribution that causes discontent and, hence, riots (Midlarsky, 1982; Midlarsky & Roberts, 1985; Muller, 1985; Muller & Seligson, 1987; Russett, 1964).

2 The reasons for the incidence of landlessness in the south need to be searched in history and in its long shadow. Peasants were usually constrained in a condition of extreme poverty by the low salaries paid by landlords. This meant that socioeconomic mobility was almost non-existent and exacerbated by a long period of labour immobility and by 19th-century protectionist policies for agricultural goods that increased the economic power of rich landlords (Galasso, 1974; Percoco, 2016).

3 In our analysis, we will refer to the PCI, although in the 1948 election the PCI was allied with the PSI in the Fronte Popolare, so the percentage of votes refers to the coalition. We prefer to use ‘PCI’ since it was by far the stronger party and because of the internal debate over the issue of land inequality.

4 All covariates are also in logarithms.