Land, Votes and Violence: Political Effects of the Insecurity of Property Rights over Land in Dagestan
Egor Lazarev, junior research assistant at LCSR, presented his report “Land, Votes and Violence: Political Effects of the Insecurity of Property Rights over Land in Dagestan” on October 6th. Egor reported from the University of Michigan, where he is currently Carnegie visiting scholar.
The research question was the following: how do insecure property rights affect electoral competition and the level of violence?
In the North Caucasus the land problem came to be of critical concern after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Russian Government enacted a moratorium on land privatization in most of the North Caucaus republics in the early 1990s. As a result, after twenty years the region developed different forms of de facto private property rights. The most difficult situation with land tenure formed in Dagestan. The capture of land by local strongmen and organized crime was aggravated by the consequences of the population’ migration from highland to plain districts and a significant population increase which both lead to land deficit and conflicts.
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The districts of Dagestan vary a lot in terms of geographical, economic and political conditions. Currently Dagestan is experiencing a very high level of violence. According to many experts, the situation in Dagestan can be most accurately described as low-level civil war. Dagestan over the whole post-Soviet period has been subjected to political assassinations, riots, inter-ethnic and communal conflicts. In the current study different indicators are used to characterize violence: acts of terrorism; counterterrorist operations of law enforcement agencies against so-called NVF - illegal armed groups of the Islamist insurgents; political assassinations; and ethnic conflicts and acts of communal violence that in the Dagestan context are called «mass fights with the use of weapons».
Egor’s work is based on data collected during field research in the republic of Dagestan during fall 2010 and spring 2011. Besides, Egor used the “Chronicle of Violence in Dagestan” database for the period from 2003 to 2011, collected by the information portal “The Caucasian Knot”. The districts of Dagestan are the entity of analysis.
According to the results of the study, the disparity between the Soviet period and the post-soviet amounts of tenured land, that shows the presence of unregistered land, seriously affects later electoral competition and indices of violence. The bigger the percentage of untenured land, the less the electoral competition and the more intense is violence. Consequently, the study finds that the insecurity of property rights creates opportunity structure for electoral patronage and violent expression of conflicts and grievances.
The population increase explains much of the variation of the violence level in different districts of Dagestan. This result could be interpreted so that high level of migration, population increase in whole and youth unemployment connected with it all lead to high levels of violence. Apart from that, a lot of variables included into statistical models appeared insignificant. For example, subsides per capita which show the poverty level and the extent to which the districts’ leaders participate in the republic’s budget market. The ethnolinguistic fractionalization is also insignificant. This finding destroys the popular myth that the violence in the North Caucasus has predominantly ethnopolitical nature.
In whole, the redistribution of land which occurred after the collapse of USSR and the implementation of the moratorium on land privatization can be interpreted as a natural experiment on the functioning of different quasi-tenure regimes. The investigation of this “experiment’s” effects makes it possible to argue that the unregulated land relations and insecure property rights are a significant factor rising violence at the district level.