Land Reform and Rural Rebellion: A Test of Hunting's Thesis

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Land reform has been portrayed as a remedy for rural instability in the Third World on the grounds that it alleviates the extremes of inequality that are thought to be the root causes of social instability. However, rarely has land reform succeeded in abating an on-going civil war nor has land reform precluded revolutionary challenges from recurring in its aftermath. Part of the problem is that agrarian reform is often accompanied by repressive violence. Thus land reform must compete with repressive violence in the `struggle for the hearts and minds` of the peasantry. This project tests a model of the competing effects of land reform and repressive violence on the political loyalties of peasants. Data collected from El Salvador from the 1980s through the 1990s is used to test the model. These data include election results, land reform beneficiaries, victims of repressive, insurgent and combat violence and national events over this time period. These data provide direct empirical evidence on the widely accepted linkage between inequality and instability and the corollary proposition that land reform should restore rural stability.