Twentieth-century peasant mobilization pushed the Peruvian central government to expand its reach into rural areas. The paper argues that mid-century collective action gave incumbents a political incentive to create local bureaucratic offices that could address peasant demands and integrate peripheral communities into the state.
📚 Mid-century municipal evidence on protests and state offices
- Novel dataset documenting bureaucratic presence across municipalities in mid-20th-century Peru.
- Municipal-level measures of peasant collective action and mobilization from the same period.
📈 What the data reveal
- The Peruvian president responded to peasant mobilization by investing in new bureaucratic offices capable of responding to peasant demands.
- Those investments in bureaucracy endured over time and enabled the implementation of pro-peasant policies.
- Municipalities with earlier peasant mobilization experienced reduced violence during the Shining Path insurgency of the late 20th century.
- The overall pattern indicates a surprising reversal: early peasant mobilization is associated with a long-term reduction in later rural unrest.
🛠️ Why this matters
- Shows a concrete pathway from rural contention to durable state capacity in peripheral areas of the Global South.
- Suggests that responsive bureaucratic expansion can convert short-term mobilization into long-term policy gains and reduced insurgent violence.
- Offers new empirical leverage for debates on state-building, contentious politics, and governance in Latin America.
