Calendrier du 12 juin 2024
Development Economics Seminar
Du 12/06/2024 de 16:30 à 18:00
R1-15
KOEHLER-DERRICK Gabriel (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Tribal Voting in New Democracies: Evidence from 6 Million Tunisian Voter Records
Do candidates who share a tribal identity with voters outperform candidates who do not? Considerable research has examined this question in the Middle East, but in many of these key cases autocratic regimes supported political institutions that reinforced tribal ties, making it hard to discern the independent effect of tribal identity on voter behavior. We revisit this question in (at the time) democratic Tunisia, where post-independence governments tried to uproot tribal identity, making it a “least likely” case to uncover tribal influence on election outcomes. To estimate the effect of tribal influence on voting, we match an historical dictionary of Tunisian tribes to surnames from the universe of both registered voters and candidates from Tunisia’s recent local elections (2018). We find preliminary evidence consistent with the claim that tribal affiliations do “matter:” lists whose candidates share a tribal identity with the underlying population consistently outperform lists who do not share this identity. Our work suggests that despite decades of policies designed to suppress tribes, tribal identity exerted a measurable effect on local politics during a period of democratic transition
Economic History Seminar
Du 12/06/2024 de 12:00 à 13:30
R1.09
MOSHRIF Rowaida (PSE)
Long-run Land inequality and Land Reform in Egypt (1896-2020)
This study focuses on the long-term evolution of land inequality in Egypt and assesses the redistributive role of the 1952 agrarian land reform. Using newly digitized data on landownership distribution since 1896, I provide the first long-term estimates of land inequality covering the late 19th century up to 2020. The findings indicate that land distribution was highly unequal in the first half of the 20th century, with the top 1% of landowners holding over 45% of total private agricultural land in Egypt. Of this, 25% of the land was owned by foreigners, while the rest belonged to Egyptian large landowners who were granted land by the Muhammed Ali dynasty in the 19th century. The 1952 agrarian land reform reduced land inequality by redistributing land from large landowners to small landowners. Specifically, the landownership share of the top 1% decreased from 43% to 28%, while the landownership of the bottom 90% rose from 27% to 42%. This redistribution was more substantial following the abolition of religious endowments, known as ”Waqf,” which were initially used by large landowners to preserve large properties from fragmentation through inheritance