Agrarian Developmentalism: The Politics of Development Strategies in Twentieth-Century Latin America

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Madai Urteaga
Kellogg Institute Postdoctoral Visiting Fellow

The conventional wisdom holds that governments extracted from agriculture to promote industrialization. Yet, development strategies were not uniform. While some governments did extract from agriculture, others actively supported the sector in what I call agrarian developmentalism. What explains this variation? I argue that the structure of rural representation in the party system played a critical role. Integrative party systems— where rural constituencies cut across parties—were more favorable to agriculture. In these systems, politicians converged on pro-rural programs, included rural producers in governing coalitions, and brokered rural-urban bargains to solve distributional conflicts. By contrast, segmented party systems—where parties’ core constituencies were either urban or rural—fostered intersectoral conflict at agriculture’s expense. Drawing on a comparative historical analysis of Colombia and Chile, and qualitative and quantitative analysis of original data, I demonstrate systematic variation in party system structure and how it produced distinct agricultural policy regimes.