Role of Elites in the Formation of Enduring Political Loyalties

• In Event: The Political Legacies of Violence

Abstract

It is well established that some political identities tend to endure over multiple generations. Yet the processes by which these identities are created and how they persist remains poorly understood. In this project, we explore the role that community elites play in the creation and continuity of electoral identities. Specifically, we examine the effect of community-level Nazi-sponsored repression against Catholic priests in Bavaria in the 1930s on voting behavior in the post-WWII period. To establish a causal connection between priest repression and post-war voting we leverage the fact that Catholic priests were assigned to parishes in a quasi-random fashion. Having constructed a settlement-level dataset on the nature and degree of repression against individual priests, we demonstrate that communities where priests faced higher levels of repression in the 1930s were more likely to vote for Christian democrats (CSU) after 1945. This suggests that repression against community elites leads to a backlash among ordinary members of communities where repression had occurred and gives rise to enduring political identities.

Authors

• Leonid V. Peisakhin, New York University - Abu Dhabi

• Didac Queralt, Yale University