Many democracies around the world feature pervasive clientelist practices. How these systems emerge and persist is a central question in political economy. Redistribution policies can reduce poverty and inequality, thus undermining important determinants of clientelism. On the other hand, these policies may increase the dependency of voters on politicians, thus promoting clientelist exchanges. Therefore, the relation between redistribution and clientelism is a priori ambiguous. We study how voting and clientelism respond to a major redistribution policy, the 1950 Italian land reform. Using a panel spatial regression discontinuity and data for half a century, we show that the large-scale redistribution led to the emergence of a long-lasting clientelist system characterized by political brokers, patronage, and targeted benefits. Within this system, the Christian Democratic party, which promoted the reform, experienced persistent electoral gains.

We study whether work practices adopted in recent history in agriculture influence the political empowerment of women in a European country. Focusing on Italy, we study the case of female rice weeders and their successful history of unionization and mobilization for better working conditions. Relying on an instrumental variable strategy to predict quasi-exogenous variation in rice production, we test whether the historical presence of female rice weeders predicts differences in measures of political empowerment during the second half of the XX century. We find that towns where rice production was historically relevant had higher support for divorce in the 1974 referendum, have more women in politics, and are more likely to have a nursery school. Our results suggest the importance of collective action of working women to achieve persistent female political empowerment.