16 have disproportionately benefitted agriculture (e.g., extending voting rights to small farmers and tenants in the early twentieth century) have induced an increase in protectionism. In contrast, other electoral changes have not affected agricultural protection because they increased the voting rights of both those in favor and those against protection.

Olper, Falkowski, and Swinnen (2011) employ both difference-in-differences regressions and semi-parametric matching methods, exploiting the time-series and crosssectional variation in the World Bank’s data showing that democratization causes an increase in RRAs (that is, democratization tends to reduce agricultural taxation and/or increase agricultural subsidization). However, they do not find any support for a reduction in positive RRAs. In other words, a country’s transition to democracy may change the distribution of policy rents but need not lead to more-efficient policies. Moreover, the study also finds that the reverse political transition (from democracy to autocracy) does not affect agricultural protection.

Some researchers have empirically assessed the impact of rulers’ preferences. It appears that agricultural interests have been protected mostly by right-wing governments. Olper (2001) found that in OECD countries, on average, right-wing governments are more protectionist in the case of agriculture than are left-wing governments. This is consistent with other empirical analyses, such as that of Bates (1983), who argues that socialist rulers in Africa taxed farmers (by imposing low commodity prices). Similarly, Tracy (1989) finds that right-wing governments in Europe (such as those dominated by Catholic parties and conservative parties, including the Nazi party in Germany) tended to support farm interests and protectionism. Although, on average, left-wing governments support agriculture less, they tend to support farmers more in unequal societies (Olper 2007). For example, for more than a century in France, large farms and landowners have been associated with right-wing political parties and small farms with left-wing parties (Swinnen 2010). This empirical result also holds more generally: right-wing dictators are more inclined to support agriculture if the sector is dominated by large-scale farms and estates, whose owners typically support right-wing rules.

As economies develop, so do rulers’ preferences. One illustration is the fact that as their economies evolved, agricultural policies of left-wing Communist autocracies shifted from taxing to subsidizing agriculture (as was also true in democracies). Communist dictators of poor countries (such as Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, and Hoxha in Albania) heavily taxed agriculture. However, farmers were subsidized at higher incomes in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev and in most East European Communist countries in the 1970s and 1980s (Rozelle and Swinnen 2010).

Finally, rulers’ preferences are not restricted to left-wing or right-wing ideologies; they may also reflect regional interests. Bates and Block (2010) show that the regional backgrounds of leaders in Africa significantly affected their policy preferences, given the autocratic political systems’ influence on policies. Leaders who drew their political support from cities and semi-arid regions (as in Tanzania and Ghana) seized a major portion of revenues generated by the export of cash crops (coffee and cocoa). In contrast, in countries where leaders came from (and were supported by) regions where cash crops were important sources of income (such as in Kenya and Ivory Coast), leaders employed the power of the state to defend the fortunes of their (wealthy) regions and imposed little, if any, taxation on coffee and cocoa exports.

# _3.2.3. Organization_

Improvements in rural infrastructure have affected agricultural interests’ ability to organize for political action. Regardless of governance structures, in order to influence political choices effectively, interest-group members must act in unison. For their collective action to yield meaningful results, organizational structures must be established that can mobilize