Land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies
The project
The distribution of land is nearly absent in contemporary political economy scholarship on advanced democracies. We usually associate land conflict with agriculture, and - so the usual argument goes - as the importance of agriculture declined in the Global North, the salience of the land distribution declined with it. This project, funded by a three-year Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, challenges this view. Many sectors other than agriculture use land as a key input: from tourism to urban retail, from energy production to carbon offsetting, from manufacturing to wholesale distribution in post-industrial areas. How land is distributed locally - the degree to which it is concentrated or fragmented - determines what types of economic opportunities local residents have in areas specialised in those sectors, and, as a result, how they think about politics. The project explores those relations with geospatial analysis based on cadastral (land registry) data in the context of Greece, Spain, and the UK.
Working papers
“Resort capitalism or smallholder tourism? How the land distribution still shapes the politics of place in advanced economies” (with Lamprini Rori). Based on data from the Hellenic and Spanish cadastres, the EU’s Corine land cover database, the Google Places database, and national election results, this paper shows that the distribution of coastal land shapes the tourism models that develop in suitably endowed areas of Greece and Spain - with electoral consequences.
“Turning economic disadvantages into resources for climate adaptation: smallholder and estate-based agriculture at a time of climate crisis” (with Dimitris Panagiotopoulos and Sotiris Alexakis). This paper explores the determinants of resilience of smallholder and estate-based agriculture at a time of climate crisis based on subnational case studies in Greece and Spain.
“Land concentration and trajectories of deindustrialisation: Evidence from the UK”. This paper uses UK land registry data to examine how land concentration shaped trajectories of industrialisation and deindustrialisation at a local level in Britain.
Funding
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship, “Land inequality and the politics of place in advanced democracies”, sole PI, 2024-2027
Research grant by Piraeus Bank, “Smallholder agriculture in Greece and its resilience over time”, Deputy Scientific Advisor, July 2025-June 2027 (€99,200)