**An award-winning political scientist shows that a society’s path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the land“Fascinating...a must read.” —Thomas Piketty, New York Times–bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First CenturyA New Yorker Best Book of the Year**For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land P...

Major land reform programs have reallocated property in more than one-third of the world's countries in the last century and impacted over one billion people. But only rarely have these programs granted beneficiaries complete property rights. Why is this the case, and what are the consequences? This book draws on wide-ranging original data and charts new conceptual terrain to reveal the political origins of the property rights gap. It shows that land reform programs are most often implemen...

¿Cuándo y por qué los países redistribuyen la tierra a los sin tierra? ¿A qué fines políticos sirve la reforma agraria y qué lugar ocupa en el mundo actual? Una literatura de larga data que se remonta a Aristóteles y que se repite en importantes trabajos recientes sostiene que la redistribución debería ser tanto mayor como más dirigida a los pobres bajo la democracia. Sin embargo, faltan datos históricos completos para probar esta afirmación. Este libro muestra que la redistribución de la ...

When and why do countries redistribute land to the landless? What political purposes does land reform serve, and what place does it have in today's world? A long-standing literature dating back to Aristotle and echoed in important recent works holds that redistribution should be both higher and more targeted at the poor under democracy. Yet comprehensive historical data to test this claim has been lacking. This book shows that land redistribution - the most consequential form of redistribu...

An award-winning political scientist shows that a society’s path to prosperity, sustainability, and equality depends on who owns the landFor millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it...

This book argues that - in terms of institutional design, the allocation of power and privilege, and the lived experiences of citizens - democracy often does not restart the political game after displacing authoritarianism. Democratic institutions are frequently designed by the outgoing authoritarian regime to shield incumbent elites from the rule of law and give them an unfair advantage over politics and the economy after democratization. Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democrac...

Canonical theories of political economy struggle to explain patterns of distribution in authoritarian regimes. In this Element, Albertus, Fenner, and Slater challenge existing models and introduce an alternative, supply-side, and state-centered theory of 'coercive distribution'. Authoritarian regimes proactively deploy distributive policies as advantageous strategies to consolidate their monopoly on power. These policies contribute to authoritarian durability by undercutting rival elites a...

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down ...

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down ...