We study the political consequences of a major land reform in Italy, which split large estates and transferred land to small owners. Using a panel spatial regression discontinuity design, we show that the reform benefited the incumbent Christian Democrat party. The electoral benefits persist for...

This paper examines how the partisanship of empowered subnational politicians can impact within-district benefit distribution. I present a theory of the role of subnational politicians in distributive politics, and then test this theory on a distributive Venezuelan land reform initiative by...