Innovative and ambitious, Property without Rights is a must-read for scholars interested in land reform, rural development, and democracy. Michael Albertus’s knowledge of the spectrum of land reform programs and rural property rights across Latin America over a century is stunning. Although land reform in Latin America has received considerable scholarly attention, most work is limited to a single country, and almost no work addresses the question of rural property rights.

Albertus develops an important new concept: the “property rights gap.” This gap is the difference between the percentage of cultivable land in a country that is redistributed and the percentage of cultivable land that is titled. Through assiduous research in agricultural ministries and archives, Albertus compiles a comprehensive dataset on annual and cumulative property rights gaps in all 19 Latin American countries from 1920 to 2010. Albertus identifies three broad patterns of property rights gaps: Path A, rare in Latin America—countries without property rights gaps because they either never redistributed land or redistributed land with property rights; Path B, the most common—countries with property rights gaps that eventually closed them; and Path C, also relatively rare—countries with property rights gaps that never closed them.

There are two main questions in the book: Why do governments generate property rights gaps? And why do governments close property rights gaps? Albertus argues persuasively that, for both generating and closing gaps, regime type—authoritarian versus democratic regimes, measured through the Polity IV index—is key.

With respect to the generation of gaps, Albertus argues that authoritarian regimes whose ruling coalitions do not include landed elites are more likely than democratic regimes to implement land reform. This argument was made previously by Albertus in his brilliant Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Reform (2015). Here, he adds a major caveat: these authoritarian regimes are less likely than democratic regimes to accompany reform with property rights. By contrast, democratic regimes provide property rights because (unlike land reform itself) they are not opposed by elites, because international financial institutions applied pressure for them during the 1990s–2000s, and because the regimes want peasants’ votes. In Chapter 4, Albertus’s arguments are strongly supported through a rigorous statistical analysis.

These arguments are also examined through qualitative analysis, in particular Latin American countries, with considerable attention to Mexico and a great deal of attention to Peru. In both his statistical and qualitative analyses, Albertus finds that not only authoritarian regime type but also leftist ideology and urban policy bias are significant factors to the withholding of property rights. In the qualitative analyses of Mexico and Peru, Albertus emphasizes how authoritarian regime type matters: authoritarian regimes seek to control the peasantry and can do so more effectively if they withhold property rights. For Albertus, property rights gaps are “politically valuable” (p. 23). They provide “coercive leverage over peasant beneficiaries to maintain order and elicit support at critical times” (p. 166).

I agree that one goal of most authoritarian regimes is control of their citizens. But the political goals of both Mexico’s and Peru’s authoritarian regimes were complex. And scholars agree that, to the extent that Peru’s military government sought hierarchical control of citizens, it failed. In Mexico, the authoritarian regime implementing agrarian reform endured more than 60 years afterward, but in Peru, barely a decade afterward.

Albertus does not thoroughly address the reason emphasized by the authorities in Peru and elsewhere for redistribution without property rights: the retention of the economies of scale of haciendas (large, semifeudal but often well-capitalized Latin American estates). The four Latin American governments that redistributed with property rights—Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay—did not redistribute more than 2% of cultivable land in any one year and were consequently not expropriating many haciendas at one time. By contrast, in major Latin American reforms, the challenge of what to do with haciendas loomed large. Of course, Albertus is recommending their immediate dissolution into smallholdings with titles. But how would the capital equipment be allocated among smallholders? How would superior versus inferior land be assessed? How would the ex-hacienda workers, who had often been denied educations, navigate such challenges as securing credit and marketing products? We can better understand why Chile and Guatemala redistributed without property rights despite their status as democracies (p. 284) if we recognize the difficulties of quickly dividing up well-capitalized estates. Of the 14 Latin American governments that redistributed more than 2% of cultivable land in any one year, none did so with property rights.

Albertus poses a third major question: what are the consequences of a property rights gap for social and economic development? He argues that they are dire. In one chapter, he compares outcomes in Path A countries (without a gap) to Paths B/C countries (with a gap) in the decades after land reform. In a subsequent chapter, he compares outcomes in core areas within Peru’s agrarian reform zones (where gaps were larger) to periphery areas (where gaps were smaller) through an innovative geographic regression discontinuity design. Albertus finds that, in the Paths B/C countries and in the core areas of Peru’s agrarian reform zones, the percentage of the population working in the agricultural sector is higher (because agrarian reform beneficiaries are tightly tied to the land); agricultural productivity per rural worker grows more slowly; urban policy bias (indicated by such measures as access to education) is more severe; income inequality becomes higher; and income per capita becomes lower. Similarly, Albertus argues that, as titling proceeds, outcomes improve; for example, in Mexico, “Overall economic growth has been robust since the early 1990s—albeit without some serious hiccups” (p. 194).

Albertus’s assessments of outcomes are not entirely persuasive. Ideally, Albertus would have compared outcomes within each country for land redistributed without property rights to land immediately redistributed with property rights. But, as mentioned, very few large estates were immediately divided. It is a stretch to argue that a property rights gap or its narrowing, affecting perhaps only some 20% of cultivable land, explains a national-level outcome, such as Mexico’s income per capita, a decade or so later. In addition, there are only three Path A countries. Perhaps the most telling outcome would be for agricultural productivity per worker in Peru, but data are available only after 1996, more than 15 years after redistribution ended.

Without an analysis of outcomes for hacienda land immediately redistributed with property rights, a question emerges: are Albertus’s views of smallholders too rosy? Albertus enthusiastically describes outcomes for the smallholders who claimed public lands in democratic Costa Rica. But would outcomes have been similar for former hacienda workers in authoritarian Peru? As Albertus acknowledges, smallholders, too, often need loans and investment.

Despite these concerns, Property without Rights is a major contribution—empirically rich and theoretically provocative. Albertus has built an extraordinary dataset for land reform and property rights in Latin America, and he has highlighted, perhaps more clearly than ever before, the importance of property rights in Latin America and beyond.