Agrarian Politics and Development

Rural insurrections in Third World nations transformed the study of agrarian politics into a recognized subfield of political development. They also discredited prevailing development theories and while rendering development studies a subfield of political economy. This essay reviews the major approaches to the study of agrarian politics. It emphasizes two major weaknesses: the assumption that development implies the demise of the rural sector and the inability of most "economic" approaches to incorporate institutional features of peasant societies, thereby creating a wasteful disjuncture between political economy and anthropology in the study of rural societies. The collective choice approach, it is argued, rectifies these weaknesses and generates a fruitful agenda for new research into the political economy of Third World nations.