Landholding Inequality and the Political Economy of Place: the Case of Greece

Political scientists have long studied income inequality, but wealth and particularly landholding inequality have only recently started to re-acquire the attention they deserve in the discipline. This paper contributes to this emerging literature by developing a theory about the economic and political effects of the landholding distribution at the local level and by testing it based on original data from Greece. Focusing on the implications of the landholding distribution for the structure of local economic production, the paper explores the hypothesis that greater land fragmentation is associated with a higher share of the local population having the propensity to operate a small business, whether by directly using land as an input or by using it as collateral to secure financing. This manifests through an occupational structure characterised by a higher share of business owners compared to areas with more concentrated landholding, which will instead have a higher share of employees. Areas with a fragmented land distribution will also exhibit lower economic concentration in land-intensive sectors than areas with concentrated landownership. A long political science literature leads us to expect that these structural economic characteristics will, in turn, influence the local population’s political preferences. The paper examines these linkages using geospatial data from the Greek cadastre to capture the size and distribution of land parcels for each land use, data from the Labour Force Survey and Statistical Business Register to determine occupational structure and sectoral concentration at the municipal level, and national election results to explore the associations with voting behaviour.