Our theory treats nominally democratic institutions as constraints that autocrats struggle to loosen and citizens’ beliefs as the central battlefield on which the struggle for political change is waged. After reviewing the book’s key findings, in this chapter we use our theoretical framework to suggest a series of important questions about autocratic politics in the early twenty-first century. We explore how the world’s autocrats are attempting to shape their citizens’ beliefs by weaponizing distinctly modern technologies, not just propaganda and censorship. We also discuss how the world’s autocrats are attempting to loosen the electoral constraints that bind them. Although this book is about propaganda in autocracies, it has important implications for politics in democracies, especially as a series of “populist-authoritarian” leaders take power across Europe and North America. We argue, in particular, that Xi Jinping’s propaganda strategy helps us understand the process of democratic erosion underway across the world. We conclude by discussing the book’s implications for public policy.

The concluding chapter discusses limitations to the property rights paradigm. Neoliberal property rights are not a cure-all for rural development. There is an emerging consensus from the United Nations, World Bank, and FAO on the need for more context-specific property rights and international guidelines on how to respect, record, and strengthen such rights, especially customary rights. The conclusion then shows how the book’s theory speaks to the broader relationship between politics and markets beyond land and redistribution. States can generate new markets or enable the rise of markets, or new markets can arise organically. A government can then choose whether, and how, to delineate and protect property rights in those markets. Like with property rights in land, a country’s political institutions (democracy vs. dictatorship) as well as government coalitional dynamics (between elite factions and citizens) and foreign pressure determine property rights regimes. The conclusion applies to the evolution of subsoil property rights over oil in Mexico, subsoil mining rights for mineral natural resources in the United States, and property rights in the banking sector in Venezuela.

This chapter starts with the puzzle of why governments would distribute land without property rights. It then provides an overview of the evolution of property rights in Latin America from Spanish colonization through decolonization into the present. This period covered land appropriation and forced labor, high landholding inequality, and private property rights by landed elites and the church that were in many countries stripped through land redistribution. But rural peasants received land in collectives, cooperatives, informally, or through nationalizations rather than with individual land titles. The chapter provides a conceptualization of the property rights gap and a typology of different gaps. It frames why withholding property rights is puzzling from the economics perspective that property rights support investment, efficiency, and development. It previews existing explanation for rights informality, including weak state capacity, left-wing ideology, and competing state goals. The chapter then summarizes how authoritarian regimes withhold rights to exert rural social control and democracies and foreign pressure can extend rights.