Abstract/Description

Many authoritarian regimes use policy-based strategies of social control instead of more coercive tools like repression. When these regimes transition to democracy, do authoritarian successors pay a political price for such policies? This paper examines the political cost of one common authoritarian policy of social control – land settlement schemes – in Spain. The Franco dictatorship initiated a decades-long program to ameliorate land pressure by resettling excess rural labor in hundreds of new government-created towns in colonization zones throughout the country. This paper examines post-democratization voting patterns in municipalities containing new towns compared to a counterfactual set of proximate similar municipalities that were also in government-created colonization zones. I find that land settlement caused a backlash once Spain returned to democracy: voters disproportionately supported the left at the expense of the regime’s successor parties. I attribute this to a legacy of authoritarian political and economic oversight and manipulation in regime-created towns.