Land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies

Since January 2024, I am working on a new project on “land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies” in the framework of a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowsip at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) in Oxford.

About

Landholding inequality is nearly absent in contemporary political economy scholarship on advanced democracies. Given the decline of the agricultural sector, it is implicitly assumed to no longer matter in the Global North. This project challenges this assumption. The landholding distribution affects the local organisation of all sectors that use large areas of land as an input, influencing individuals’ employment and investment opportunities and shaping rural areas’ sense of place. Using a mixed-methods approach, I will develop and test a theory linking the landholding distribution in productive sectors and political preferences along the left-right and cosmopolitan- nationalist dimensions in advanced democracies today.