When rural populations hold land without property rights, this has important and wide-ranging economic, social, and political consequences. Property rights gaps keeps land reform beneficiaries dispersed across the countryside working in agriculture, slowing urbanization. Property rights gaps distort incentives to invest in improvements and inputs due to land tenure insecurity and a lack of access to credit, slowing growth in agricultural productivity. And property rights gaps are linked to urban policy bias by disadvantaging rural dwellers from accessing the same basic services such as education and opportunities for employment by the state that urban dwellers enjoy. These dynamics fuel economic inequality and they sow the seeds of underdevelopment and slow economic growth. Property rights gaps also have direct political consequences that shape the nature of access to power, the ability to translate preferences into policy, and contestation within society. They inhibit the ability of rural groups to exercise political power relative to cities. And they They are foster clientelism and vote buying rather than programmatic linkages between parties and voters.

In this chapter, I highlight the historical prevalence of sovereign default as a potentially devastating form of economic crisis.I also identify that, despite the decision to default being held by politicians or politically-appointed actors, our understanding of the political dynamics surrounding default is limited.I conclude by summarizing my regime-contingent argument on the political economy of default.

This chapter develops my theory of regime-contingent sovereign default by focusing on two strategies of mass politics:voting and revolt.I argue that partitioning citizens into urban versus rural agents aligns closely with traditional accounts of groups with advantages in these two strategies:specifically, urban citizens are generally considered to enjoy advantages for protest activity, whereas rural citizens have frequently been identified as crucial swing voters.After noting that these groups differ in their preferences for food price policy, I link the pressure from urban revolt to sovereign default in autocracies, particularly those that import a great deal of food.Conversely, rural electoral pressure often leads to large farm price supports which can be difficult to remove during fiscal crisis, suggesting that more rural democracies (especially those that export a great deal of costly food) should be more likely to default.The chapter concludes by also considering variation within regimes:electoral autocracies are argued to dilute the sole focus of autocrats on urban areas, whereas contentious democracies should lead to reduced emphasis on rural voters.