Rural Interests, Rural Control, and the Development of Agrarian Property Rights.

This paper seeks to explain variation in agriculture property rights in Algeria and Tunisia. Agricultural property rights have been the central arena of politicking in both states at each of the critical junctures of more generalized property rights innovation or reform (colonization, decolonization, collectivization, privatization). Attempting to explain variation in policy trajectories, it argues that agricultural property rights have been highly conditioned by the political institutions created and used by the French and post-independence regimes to maintain economic and political management of the countryside, whereby land and agricultural policy has been used as political leverage to manipulate rural elite and peasant support for (or acquiescence to) the regime. Unlike many studies of the Middle Eastern state and institutions, which focus on the predatory or top-heavy nature of the state, this paper places special emphasis on the role played by local level actors in the design of those political institutions. More precisely, it argues that agricultural property rights are the result of a dynamic negotiation process (formal and informal) between the capital (and urban elites) and the agrarian periphery (and local notables) over the centralization or devolution of political and economic autonomy to or from the central government. This paper argues that resulting variation in political economic institutions created to control the countryside have been conditioned by several factors, including: the degree of colonial penetration; the degree of state and party penetration into the countryside in the post-colonial era; the type of rural organization and production (which largely condition the political and economic import of the rural elite and peasantry); and the relationship between the ruling party and rural elite. The paper is based on field research conducted in Constantine and Oran, Algeria and Tunis, Tunisia during the 2001-2002 academic year, and in June-July 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]