Why Dictators Reward Central Families: Evidence From Paraguay’s Land Grants

🔎 What the study asks and argues

This research asks how authoritarian rulers choose which local elites to co-opt with rents. The core argument is that elites who occupy central positions in their locality’s family network exert greater social influence over community members and are therefore more likely to be targeted with distributive benefits as a tool of social control.

🧾 New data: Family networks linked to illegal land grants (1954–2007)

• A novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks is assembled and linked to records of families that illegally benefited from public land grants spanning 1954–2007.
• The focus period for testing the co-optation argument is the 1954–88 dictatorship.

🧪 Research design: A difference-in-differences in reverse

• Causal inference is pursued using a difference-in-differences in reverse design to assess whether higher local network centrality predicts being chosen as a beneficiary of redistributed rents during the dictatorship.

📊 Key findings

• Local families with higher network centrality were more likely to receive illegal public land grants during the 1954–88 dictatorship.
• Localities with more central families show greater affiliation with the ruling Colorado Party and higher incidence of repression before 1989—interpreted as indicators of strengthened social control.

🔍 Why this matters

These results show that family ties and kin networks can be an important mechanism through which authoritarian regimes build and sustain ruling coalitions, using targeted distribution to elites who can influence and control local populations.