The chapter examines the process of state building in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945, showing that mass uprooting shored up the demand for state-provided resources and weakened resistance to governance. It exploits the placement of the interwar border between Poland and Germany to estimate the effects of postwar population transfers on the size of the state. It then examines the political legacies of population transfers in post-1989 Poland.

Chapter 6 examines the devastating toll that the development of the hydropower nation took on people’s lives. In Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, over 430,000 people were forced to leave their homes and communities due to the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. This chapter focuses on the resettlement of over 7,000 residents from Henan to Gansu, revealing how the state’s pursuit of hydroelectricity not only altered the Yellow River’s physical landscape but also caused irreparable harm to the affected communities.

Almost all psychological research relevant to revolutions focuses on the conditions in which collective action takes place to topple the ruling regime; almost no attention has been given to what happens after revolutions. Psychologists have homed in on relative deprivation, perceived injustice, identity processes, morality, and related factors as important in collection mobilization. But no serious attention has been given to the question of why after regime change almost all revolutionary governments fail to change mass behavior in line with their revolutionary ideals. The concept of political plasticity is applied in this chapter to explain this failure. Change at the macropolitical and macroeconomic levels can come overnight with the signing of a radical new constitution, but change of actual behavior in line with the ideals of the new constitution takes a much longer time, if it is possible at all. An example is the efforts of the Soviet communists to change behavior in line with their economic and political ideals of collective ownership and collective motivation.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights globally. First, it generates an original account of the principal features of property rights over land that governments have granted to beneficiaries in the course of all major redistributive land reform programs from 1900 to 2010, including land titling, nationalization, collectivization, and the formation of cooperatives. Second, it shows that democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, coalitions among landed elites, political elites, and peasants, and legislatures under democracy impact the opening and closing of property rights gaps around the globe as in Latin America. Finally, it conducts process-tracing exercises in Portugal and China to demonstrate further support for the theory's causal mechanisms and weigh that support against alternative explanations tied to ideology and limited state capacity. The discussion of China illuminates the enormous economic, social, and human costs – and political benefits – of retaining a large property rights gap for decades on end. Weak property rights contributed to the Great Famine, and then partial property rights reforms ignited national development in the countryside and in cities.

This chapter examines land reform and property rights in Peru, which was characterized by high landholding inequality and semi-feudal landlord peasant relations until the 1960s, with roots in Spanish colonization. A transition to democracy brought initial land reform, and then a military coup in 1968 began massive land redistribution. Peasants received land through cooperatives but not property rights such as land titles. Property rights were strengthened slightly under democracy in the 1980s, but major land titling only began when Peru was facing a major economic crisis and the Shining Path insurgency in the early 1990s. President Fujimori closed Congress via an autogolpe and then worked with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to stabilize the economy and begin a nationwide land formalization program. This chapter uses process tracing, original archival documents, and interviews to detail the economic and political conditions that led to the origins and closing of Peru’s property rights gap, focusing on democracy, dictatorship, foreign pressure, and the role of landed elites, peasants, and political elites.