Land Reform and the Breakdown of Clientelist Politics in El Salvador

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Abstract
The civil war in El Salvador has produced, on the one hand, a struggle between the existing regime and a coalition of insurgent military and political organizations and, on the other hand, a struggle within the regime between the landed oligarchy and the reform-minded politicians of the Christian Democratic Party. This article presents a theoretical analysis of the political impact of the PDC's land reform program of 1980. The emergence of revolution is explained as the erosion of clientelist political structures that resulted from the rapid population growth and the shift to export agriculture over the course of the last century. Within this analytical framework, a model is derived to specify the relationships among land reform, oligarchic repression, insurgent violence, and the level of popular support for the regime. It is hypothesized that levels of support for the regime will be greatest in those political subdivisions in which land reform has been implemented and in which death squad violence had been curbed, and that this relationship should be strongest and most stable when the reforms create peasant cooperatives rather than individual smallholdings.

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