Replication Data for: Landholding Inequality, Social Control, and Mass Opposition to Suffrage Extension

Does landholding inequality undermine democratization? Pointing to endogeneity concerns, recent contributions have challenged the established argument that landholding elites oppose suffrage extension if geographically fixed assets are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance to reinvestigate the relationship. Using multiple instruments, we find that landholding inequality decreases support for suffrage extension. In addition, by focusing on traditional patterns of social control, we explore a hitherto empirically neglected mechanism linking landholding inequality and democratization. Taking advantage of four direct democratic votes between 1866 and 1877 in Switzerland, we demonstrate that landholding inequality also influences the political preferences of ordinary citizens who do not control these resources. The paper thus shows that high levels of landholding inequality provide local elites not only with the incentive but also with the means to align the local population's voting behavior with their political goals. Supplementary analyses using qualitative and quantitative data further substantiate this social control mechanism.

土地持有不平等是否会破坏民主化进程？鉴于内生性（endogeneity）问题的考量，近期研究对既有论点提出了挑战——该论点提出，若地理固定资产的分配存在不均，土地持有精英会反对选举权扩张（suffrage extension）。我们借助外生变异重新审视这一长期存在的学术议题，以推进相关研究。通过运用多重工具变量（multiple instruments），我们发现土地持有不平等会降低民众对选举权扩张的支持度。此外，我们聚焦于传统社会控制模式，探索了一个此前尚未被实证研究关注的、连接土地持有不平等与民主化的机制。借助1866年至1877年间瑞士的四次直接民主投票（direct democratic votes），我们证明，土地持有不平等同样会影响不掌握此类资源的普通公民的政治偏好。因此，本文表明，高水平的土地持有不平等不仅为地方精英提供了动机，还为其提供了手段，可使当地民众的投票行为与其政治目标保持一致。利用定性（qualitative）与定量（quantitative）数据开展的补充分析，进一步验证了这一社会控制机制。