Out of communal land: Clientelism through delegation of agricultural tenancy contracts

Do local institutions influence the nature of political clientelistic 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 clientelistic politics over bengkok land.