This chapter presents a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully influenced policymaking in democratic Brazil: a multiparty congressional caucus known as the Bancada Ruralista. It shows how agrarian elites finance the campaigns, encourage other producers to support, and subsidize the work of like-minded legislators independently of their partisan affiliation, as well as how legislators of agrarian origin collaborate across partisan lines. The chapter argues that Brazil’s Agrarian Caucus is the product of agrarian elites’ collective efforts to build a channel of electoral representation to protect their interests under democracy in a context of high political fragmentation. The threat of radical land reform during the democratic transition prompted landowners to engage in electoral politics. However, high political fragmentation among the agrarian elite rendered party-building unfeasible. The chapter discusses the advantages of an electoral, candidate-centered, multipartisan strategy over other strategies available to economic elites in democracies such as lobbying or party-building, and illustrates these advantages through the analysis of the Forest Code reform of 2012.

This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.

This chapter presents a case of nonelectoral strategies of political influence by agrarian elites in Argentina and the limitations of such strategies. Until 2008, Argentine landowners influenced politics through lobbying and, when this failed, through protests. The chapter presents evidence of how Argentine agrarian elites did not invest in electoral representation prior to 2008 because they did not experience an existential threat. It also shows how landowners decided to enter the electoral arena with the rise of an existential threat in the form of confiscatory taxes in 2008. Given Argentine agrarian elites fragmentation, they deployed a candidate-centered strategy, sponsoring the candidacies of a dozen agricultural producers for Congress under diverse party affiliations. However, institutional features and ideological differences among producers’ associations blunted the effectiveness of the strategy and led to its abandonment. Later on, with the consolidation of Propuesta Republicana (PRO) as a viable electoral alternative and the continuity of hostile polices, part of the Argentine agrarian elite has engaged in party-building. However, economic cleavages within Argentine agricultural producers continue to undermine the kind of sector-wide party-building effort that we saw in Chile during the democratic transition.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

This chapter analyses a case of party-building by agrarian elites in Chile. It presents evidence of Chilean landowners’ financial support of the political right, their identification with rightwing legislators, and the programmatic convergence between agrarian elites’ preferences and the policy positions of rightwing parties, Renovación Nacional (RN) in particular. The chapter argues that agrarian elites in Chile decided to invest in an electoral strategy of political influence at the time of the democratic transition because they feared a center-left government would endanger their property rights. It presents evidence of how this perceived threat was founded on landowners’ previous experience with democracy during the 1965–1973 period, when their farms were expropriated. The chapter also illustrates how low intragroup fragmentation facilitates party-building. Shared political and economic interests among the Chilean economic elite in general, and agrarian elites in particular, decreased the coordination costs associated with building a party to represent them. The chapter analyses the tax reform of 1990 and the Water Code reform of 2022 to show how the partisan strategy works.

This chapter explores how the book’s arguments travel beyond the analyzed cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and discusses their broader implications for the field of comparative politics, in particular for the relationship among economic elites’ political representation, democracy, and inequality. It deals with questions such as: under what conditions will landowners respond to existential threats with electoral organization instead of by trying to destabilize democracy? When are candidate-centered strategies a viable substitute for party-building? Do the same factors that shape agrarian elites’ strategic choices explain how other interest groups organize to influence policymaking? First, the chapter tests the scope conditions of the argument by analyzing agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence in a country where democracy is less consolidated: Paraguay during the Lugo administration (2008–2012). Next, it looks at party-building by agrarian elites beyond South America, in a different historical context marked by civil war: post-1979 El Salvador. Finally, the chapter extends the argument beyond agrarian elites, focusing on nonpartisan electoral representation by other interest groups in two contemporary cases: for-profit universities in Peru and conservative religious groups in Colombia.