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...

Most scholarship concludes that major redistributive programs garner support for incumbents. But redistribution can backfire when incumbents lose office and have issue ownership without control and when local program saturation is low, generating grievances. This becomes apparent when analyzing...

A growing literature concludes that modern democracies have not adopted policies that benefit the majority to the extent predicted by social conflict theory. The most prominent reason is that globalization ties the hands of policymakers, making it hard for them to redistribute. Yet while...

Who benefits and who loses during redistribution under dictatorship? This paper argues that expropriating powerful preexisting economic elites can serve to demonstrate a dictator or junta’s loyalty to their launching organization while destroying elite rivals out of government that could...

Inequality and democracy are far more compatible empirically than predicted by social conflict theory. This paper speaks to this puzzle, identifying the scope conditions under which democratization induces greater redistribution. Because autocrats sometimes have incentives to expropriate...

Recent work on the causes of democratic transition and duration highlights the obstacle inequality poses to democracy due to the redistributive threat from below. Yet inequality and democracy are much more compatible empirically than predicted by recent theory, and nowhere is this more...