War Violence, Nationalism, and Party Support: Evidence from Italy

• In Event: The Legacies of War on Political Identities and Behavior

Abstract

We study the role of collective memories in shaping the long-run legacies of violence. We propose that collective memories transmitted through family and community ties permit the intergenerational transmission of attitudes induced by violence. We then specify the conditions under which memories are politically activated, that is, they inform political behavior among those who hold them. In the aftermath of violence, if memories are not institutionalized by the state or the party system, they are not politically activated. However, changes in the political environment can resonate with local memories, influencing individual and collective behavior where they are more salient. To test this theoretical argument, we use a historical case study from the Italian front of World War II. After the battle of Cassino and the defeat of the German army along the Gustav line, widespread indiscriminate violence against local civilians was committed by members of French colonial troops, recruited in Northern Africa and deployed in Europe. Despite the relevance of these episodes for the formation of a local memory of the war in central Italy, the experiences of the population were not incorporated in the national state-sponsored memory, nor were they part of the main political cleavages of the post-war era. We use this case to study the persistence of local memories, their connection to political attitudes about one of the main features of past violence (ethnic out-groups), and the possible activation due to exogenous changes in the salience of identity issues. We conduct three analyses across two studies. First, we implement an original, geo-targeted online survey in the provinces bordering the former Gustav line. We show that memories of violence are locally transmitted across generations, and that the interpretations of war events, such as the perceived severity of French troops’ violence relative to that of the Nazi occupiers, and attribution of blame to innate group traits as opposed to individual responsibility, diverge along respondents’ political leaning. Second, we embed an experiment in the survey, which manipulates the order in which respondents receive questions about memory, relative to questions on political attitudes. We show that increasing the salience of memories negatively affects attitudes towards immigration, not only from North Africa, but also from other regions of the world. Third, we collect and combine data on exposure to violence at the municipal level, electoral outcomes, and party platforms from 1948 to 2018 and show that parties which increased the nationalist content of their manifesto after the war gained more votes in formerly victimized communities, relative to their geographic neighbors. Our results provide novel evidence on the formation of historical legacies, and on how local war experiences influence support for the radical right in contemporary Europe.

Authors

• Giacomo Lemoli, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse

• Gloria Gennaro, ETH