Does landholding inequality block democratization? Recent contributions have challenged the established argument that elites oppose suffrage extension if fixed assets such as land are unequally distributed. We advance research on this long-standing question by exploiting exogenous variance in land ownership to investigate the link between inequality and democratization. More specifically, we employ climate suitability for wheat production to estimate the impact of landholding inequality on local support for suffrage extension. By using outcomes for two popular votes on suffrage extension in 1875 and 1877, we find that more favorable climatic conditions for wheat production are robustly associated with higher support for suffrage extension. In addition, our analysis emphasizes the importance of social control in explaining how elites achieve their political goals.