Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/331504 
Year of Publication: 
2025
Series/Report no.: 
Quaderni - Working Paper DSE No. 1214
Publisher: 
Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche (DSE), Bologna
Abstract: 
This paper shows how enduring agrarian institutions shaped the long-run political consequences of historical shocks. We study Italy's sharecropping system (mezzadria)-a centuries-old fifty-fifty contract that structured rural relations across central Italy-and link its prewar prevalence to Socialist and Communist voting from 1913 to 1948. Using harmonized data for 720 agrarian zones and a combination of cross-sectional, entropy-balanced, and spatial RDD designs, we find that sharecropping was politically neutral before World War I but became a center of rural unrest and Fascist repression afterward. Areas with more sharecroppers experienced greater strike activity, targeted violence, and enduring left alignment. A daily panel of 1921 events shows repression peaking during annual contract renewals. The results reveal a "revolt-repression-realignment" mechanism through which local economic institutions converted wartime shocks into lasting partisan divides.
Subjects: 
sharecropping
agrarian conflict
repression
political polarization
JEL: 
P16
N54
N44
D72
D74
Q15
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc Logo
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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