TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Kurosaki, Takashi
AU  - Paul, Saumik
AU  - Witoelar, Firman
        TI  - Out of Communal Land: Clientelism through Delegation of Agricultural Tenancy Contracts
        PY  - 2021/Apr/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 14263
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/index.php/publications/dp14263
        AB  - Do local institutions influence the nature of political clientelist exchange? We find a positive answer in the context of a village institution prevalent in Java since the Dutch colonial rule, where democratically elected village heads receive usufruct rights over a piece of communal village land (bengkok land) as a compensation for their service in lieu of salary. To formulate how limited-term private ownership of bengkok land promotes clientelism, we model a timely delegation of agricultural tenancy contracts to villagers-cum-voters as an incumbent re-election strategy. Based on a household survey fielded in 2018 across 130 villages in Java, Indonesia, we find that the chances of a bengkok plot being rented out increase by 6 percentage points as the time of the next election becomes closer by one year, and sharecropping is preferred to a fixed-rental contract as the election approaches. The empirical results are statistically significant and remain largely unchanged against a series of robustness checks. We also find suggestive evidence of short-term efficiency loss from clientelist politics over bengkok land.
        KW  - electoral competition
KW  - agricultural tenancy
KW  - clientelism
KW  - political budget cycle
KW  - tanah bengkok
KW  - Indonesia
        ER  -