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Mass opposition to authoritarian governments is caused by economic grievances and factors which facilitate mobilization. In this article, I explore these competing explanations of revolution with a county-level analysis of the June 17, 1953, uprising against the socialist dictatorship in East Germany. I argue that grievances can drive unrest, but only when they are disproportionately large and clearly attributable to a regime. Mobilization capacity is the primary driver of unrest outcomes, but depends on group structure and communications networks which are difficult to capture using cross-national indicators. Independent farmers with intense grievances attributable to the East German regime’s agricultural collectivization policies were associated with unrest despite significant obstacles to mobilization. Construction workers with strong mobilization structures and dense communications networks were significant instigators of unrest despite small numbers and moderate grievances. These findings raise important questions for both theoretical and empirical treatments of revolutionary threats to autocratic regimes.

Conventional wisdom holds that landed elites oppose democratization. Whether they fear rising wages, labor mobility or land redistribution, landowners have historically repressed agricultural workers and sustained autocracy. What might change landowning elites’ preferences for dictatorship and reduce their opposition to democracy? Change requires reducing landowners’ need to maintain political control over labor. This transition occurs when mechanization reduces the demand for agricultural workers, eliminating the need for labor-repressive policies. We explain how the adoption of labor-saving technology in agriculture alters landowners’ political preferences for different regimes, so that the more mechanized the agricultural sector, the more likely is democracy to emerge and survive. Our theoretical argument offers a parsimonious revision to Moore’s thesis that applies to the global transformation of agriculture since his Social Origins first appeared, and results from our cross-national statistical analyses strongly suggest that a positive relationship between agricultural mechanization and democracy does in fact exist.

Economic grievances associated with landholding inequality play a central role in theories of political instability and civil conflict. However, cross-national empirical studies have failed to confirm a link between unequal distributions of land and civil war. This is due to problems in measuring and theorizing rural inequality. This paper makes a novel distinction between the effects of total landholding inequality and the concentration of land ownership on conflict. Total landholding inequality, which includes landlessness, captures economic grievances in the countryside and is positively associated with conflict. Gini coefficients of landholding concentration do not only capture grievances, but also landowners' ability to act collectively as rebels and a repressive rural elite. The relationship between landholding Ginis and conflict is shaped like an inverted 'U': inequality is associated with an increasing likelihood of conflict, but as concentration of landholdings reaches very high levels the likelihood of conflict decreases with the formation of a small repressive class of landowners. Results of cross-national regressions using new data on total land inequality and the concentration of landholdings confirm these predictions, providing novel evidence that landholding inequality is an important underlying cause of civil war.

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