Indigenous Community Recognition, Identity, and Democracy : Evidence from Peru

The collective recognition of indigenous claims to land and traditional authority have advanced rapidly in recent decades in many countries. How do these processes impact identity and views of democracy among individuals within communities themselves? I examine this in Peru, where the government has recognized thousands of indigenous communities covering one-third of the national territory. I leverage spatial and temporal variation in community recognition paired with detailed household survey data and find, using age cohort analysis, that the effects vary by generation in ways shaped by land access and scarcity. Recognition increases community self-identification, community membership, and positive views of democracy. But the effects are strongest among adults and near-adults at the time of recognition, who are best positioned to win greater access to scarce community land and invest in community life immediately post-recognition. Peru’s communities, like in many postcolonial states, struggle with multigenerational reconstitution following legacies of land dispossession