Question Revisited: Do Landlords Drive Authoritarian Outcomes?
Felix Kersting and Erik Bengtsson revisit a long-standing claim in the social-science literature: that unequal rural class structures—often summarized as "landlordism"—create ideological domination of lower classes and tilt societies toward authoritarian politics. The authors contrast this "authoritarian landlordism" model with an alternative view that rural inequality can instead spur leftist mobilization when landlords fail to maintain hegemony.
Comparing Prussia and Sweden: Case Selection and Approach
Kersting and Bengtsson focus on Prussia and Sweden, two cases typically treated as opposites on rural inequality. They challenge that contrast by showing Sweden's agrarian inequality was similar to Prussia's, and then analyze within-country relationships between measures of land inequality and three political outcomes: electoral support for Conservatives, electoral support for the Nazi party (where relevant), and voter turnout. The analysis relies on spatial and electoral correlation tests to assess whether higher land inequality is systematically associated with more conservative or anti-democratic voting patterns or with depressed participation.
Key Findings
- There is no empirical support for the authoritarian landlordism model in these cases: areas with greater land inequality do not show consistently higher support for Conservative or Nazi parties, nor consistently lower turnout.
- Sweden's political trajectory appears better explained by robust popular mobilization that countered landed elites, despite agrarian inequality similar to Prussia's.
- In Prussia, patterns point to a weakening of landlords' political influence rather than to landlord-driven ideological domination of rural voters.
Why This Matters for Scholarship
These findings complicate a simple causal story that rural inequality automatically produces authoritarian outcomes. Instead, local power dynamics—whether landlords can maintain ideological hegemony or whether organized popular movements emerge—shape political trajectories. The study urges scholars to move beyond aggregate measures of inequality and to consider elite capacity, mobilization, and the micro-level politics of rural areas when linking social structure to regime outcomes.
