Agrarian Developmentalism: The Politics of Development Strategies in Latin America

The scholarly conventional wisdom is that governments extract from agriculture to promote industrialization. Yet, development strategies are not uniform. Whereas some governments did extract from agriculture, others actively supported the sector through a strategy that I call agrarian developmentalism. Why do some governments support agriculture while others extract from it during industrialization? I argue that the structure of the party system and rural producers' legislative strength determine how development strategies treat agriculture. Integrative party systems, where parties rely on mixed rural-urban constituencies for electoral sup- port, are more favorable to agriculture. In these systems, politicians from different parties are more likely to endorse pro-rural programs, include landowners in governing coalitions, and craft intersectoral bargains to resolve urban-rural distributional conicts. In contrast, in segmented party systems, where politicians specialize in representing either urban or rural constituencies, conflicts between sectors emerge and become contentious. Urban-rural conflict is less conducive to generous and stable government support for agriculture. Additionally, rural producers' legislative strength shapes the level of extraction. Their presence in the legislature gives them formal power to systematically block agricultural taxation. The combination of an integrative party system and high levels of rural legislative strength leads to agrarian developmentalism.