Parties and the Welfare State in Late Development:
Land, Social Policy, and the Solution to Southern Spain’s Agrarian Social Question
“Just what does modernization mean for the peasantry beyond the simple but brutal truth
that sooner or later they are its victims?” Barrington Moore
Despite their status as workers, Spain’s landless peasantry has not traditionally
demanded welfare policies such as unemployment benefits. Rather, for most of the 20
th
century, they mobilized around the issue of land reform, demanding a reparto—a
division of the latifundio. With Spain’s transition to democracy in 1975, after nearly
forty years of repression under Franco, it appeared that their moment had finally come.
There was general agreement among parties on the need for agrarian reform as part of a
broader program of structural modernization.
Why, then, did the Spanish left block
grass-roots agrarian reform projects? Equally important, why, in the end, did the Spanish
socialist party “solve” the agrarian question through the creation of an unemployment
benefit that undercut the power of agrarian unions and gave local party officials and
employers significant leverage in rural labor markets?
This paper provides answers to these puzzles by challenging dominant
explanations in the comparative political economy literature on the origins and purposes
of social protection. It argues that neither class mobilization nor employer-interest
perspectives can explain the extension of unemployment protection to the Spanish rural
sector. Far from being a tool of working class mobilization, as was often the case in
northern Europe, social protection in late-democratizing, late-developing Spain was a
strategic tool in the left’s efforts to politically demobilize its supposedly ‘natural’
constituencies. The Spanish experience suggests that we need to rethink the prevailing
conceptions of the mutually reinforcing relationship among parties, policies and
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Convention