Authoritarian survival theories maintain that dictators distribute rents to elites who can control the masses. Yet, it is unclear how dictators choose beneficiary elites. We argue that elites centrally placed in their locality’s family network enjoy greater influence on other community members and, thus, are more likely to be co-opted through distribution. We test this argument by compiling a novel dataset of Paraguayan family networks that we link to families who illegally benefited from public land grants from 1954 to 2007. Using a difference-in-differences in reverse design, we find that local families with higher network centrality were more likely to receive these grants during the 1954–88 dictatorship. We also show more affiliations with the ruling Colorado Party and incidents of repression—indicators of social control—in localities with more central families before 1989. Our work shows that family ties can serve to build authoritarian ruling coalitions.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.