The Role of Communities in Preserving Political Identities

• In Event: New Approaches to the Study of Identity Formation in Comparative Context

Abstract

We leverage a quasi-experiment of history to examine the role of community in the long-term transmission of political identities. After World War II, ethnic Poles from the historical region of Galicia in western Ukraine were forcibly resettled to western Poland. In an arbitrary process, some migrants settled in their new villages as a Galicia-majority group, preserving communal ties, while others ended up in minority. We fielded an original survey to compare present-day identities in Galicia-majority and Galicia-minority villages. We find that descendants of migrants in Galicia- majority settlements are considerably more likely to exhibit traits associated with the historical Polish Galician identity and are almost indistinguishable from respondents whose families had not been displaced. Our findings suggest an important corrective to the current understanding of intergenerational transmission. Families are best able to transmit their identities when embedded in like-minded communities. Parental socialization alone, by contrast, cannot ensure long-run persistence as effectively.

Authors

• Volha Charnysh, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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