Laia Balcells

Exclusionary attitudes are often justified by histories of conflict. A large body of literature explores how making in-group victimhood salient can affect attitudes towards out-groups. Much less, however, has been done to study how episodes in history that position the in-group as perpetrators may reduce or exacerbate animosity towards the victimized group. We fill this gap by studying antisemitism in contemporary Spain. Using a well-powered and pre-registered survey experiment, we prime respondents with the historical expulsion of Jews from Spain in the fifteenth century. The effects of priming this historical episode are conditional on one’s degree of national attachment: respondents who are less attached to the Spanish nation express lower levels of antisemitism in response to the treatment, while those reporting high levels of attachment appear to exhibit a modest backlash. These results update our understanding of how majority populations confront histories that implicate their own group as perpetrators.

What are the long-term legacies of authoritarian repression on civil society? While much research has focused on high-intensity repression, we examine the more pervasive, low-intensity repression characteristic of many authoritarian regimes. We argue that repression’s effects vary by generation, reducing civic engagement among those who came of age during the authoritarian period but not among younger generations who either only lived their childhood under the regime or were children and grew up under democracy. Using data from around 140,000 individual surveys conducted between 1989 and 2017, we find that cohorts who reached adulthood during the Franco regime consistently exhibit lower civic engagement than those who came of age in democratic Spain. We show evidence consistent with the main results from complementary analyses using local-level data on repression. These findings contribute to the literature on authoritarian legacies, emphasizing the generational and contextual variability of their effects on civil society.

T he authors regret that they identified a missingness issue in a few variables in their dataset that capture state capacity, and which was due to an error in the merge code. After fixing this issue, the overall interpretation of the findings or the conclusions of the article remain unchanged. Specifically, the R merge code for the state capacity variables (04_merging_capacity_variables.R) contained errors leading to unnecessary NAs in the cross-sectional (final_cross.dta) and panel (final_panel.dta) final datasets for all the variables that were imported from the Hanson and Sigman (2021) (HS) (Capacity, Pre_ capacity, Post_capacity) and O'Reilly and Murphy (2022) (OM) datasets (Pre_sci_comp, Post_sci_comp). It also led to unnecessary NAs in the cross-sectional dataset (final_cross.dta) for the variable Sci_comp_diff, which is calculated as Post_sci_comp minus Pre_sci_ comp. The authors thank Ulaş Erdoğdu for letting them know about unnecessary missing cases in one of the variables, which helped identify the problem in the code. The authors have not identified any other errors in the imported state capacity data-only unnecessary missing values. To fix this problem, they hand coded the values of the HS and OM prewar capacity data in the cross-sectional dataset (Pre_capacity and Pre_sci_comp), and the value of the HS capacity data in the panel dataset (Capacity). They also hand coded the measures of postwar state capacity (Post_capacity and Post_sci_comp). These variables are used to calculate "state capacity difference" (Capacity_diff and Sci_comp_diff), a variable included in Table 7 of the main paper (and Table B.7 of the SM). They note that, for these variables, they have hand coded only the relevant cases for these analyses, which are wars that started before 1991 and did not end in rebel victory. The missingness issue impacted the following tables and figures in the paper and SM: Table 6 and Table 7 in the main article; Figure B.1, Table B.2, and Table B.7 in the SM. The rest of tables and figures in the article and

Authoritarian and violent experiences affect the institutional settings of post-dictatorial regimes. However, we still lack a comprehensive knowledge on how local autocratic practices of violence, repression and control influence post-dictatorial subnational politics. This special issue aims to advance our understanding of the legacies of authoritarian political regimes. It focuses on the experience of several European countries before, during and immediately after WWII, a period of intense political turbulence in which citizens were subjected to both right- and left-wing dictatorships, where repression was often embedded in systems of governance. While many individuals collaborated with the repressive regimes, others resisted them, creating long-term variation in state-citizen relations across Europe. In this introduction, we review previous research on political legacies, present an analytical framework that distinguishes between two categories of legacies - congruence and alteration - and identify several types of legacies: persistency , discontinuity , creation , reactivation , transformation , substitution , and blunting .

How do formal institutions emerge and change after a civil war? Complementing explanations focused on distributional conflict and the promotion of post-war peace and democracy, we argue that ideology plays a central role in shaping the most fundamental formal institution: the constitution. Using data from 153 civil wars between 1944–2016, we find that in the post-war period: (1) Victorious revolutionary socialist (RS) and secessionist rebels are more likely to promulgate new constitutions; (2) Victorious incumbents are more likely to adopt constitutional amendments; (3) Non-Maoist RS rebels enact constitutions with more symbolic content and rights compared to the incumbent or other victorious rebels. We illustrate the mechanisms behind these findings with a comparative analysis of multiple constitutional transitions in Cambodia. Our results underscore the importance of research on ideology and armed conflict as groups with ambitious goals for social transformation remain a powerful force for political change worldwide.

Radical right behavior and support for radical right parties have increased across many countries in recent decades. A growing body of research has argued that, similar to the spread of other extremist behaviors, this is due to an erosion of political norms. This suggests that re-stigmatizing radical right parties might be an effective way of countering their growth. We use a survey experiment in Spain that compares the effectiveness of three theory-driven interventions aimed at increasing political stigma against a radical right party. Contrary to expectations, we fail to validate the efficacy of vignette-based attempts at stigmatization, instead identifying some backlash effects. Methodologically, our findings underscore the importance of validating treatments, as we show that simple attempts at re-stigmatization can produce null or opposing effects to their intended purpose. Theoretically, our results support the idea that normalization is a “one-way street,” in that re-stigmatizing parties is difficult after a party has become normalized.

Powered by Marxist ideology, Revolutionary Socialist (RS) armed groups launched formidable challenges against incumbent regimes during the historical era of the Cold War. As both transformational and transnational actors, they were optimally positioned to execute a revolutionary war doctrine that called for a highly integrated political and military organization that could weave a dense web of interactions with civilian populations. Civil wars featuring RS rebels tended to be robust insurgencies, that is, irregular wars that lasted longer and produced more battlefield fatalities compared to other civil wars. However, this superior capacity failed to translate into a higher rate of victories—hence, a “Marxist Paradox.” By posing a credible threat, RS rebellions engendered equally powerful regime counter-mobilizations. We show how ideology shaped armed conflict in a particular world-historical time and point to implications for the current state of civil conflict.

When are far right parties punished for their extreme positions? We argue that the punishments of deviant position-taking are conditional on the degree to which a far right party is normalized or stigmatized in the party system. When the far right is treated as normal, the costs suffered from these parties’ extreme positions decrease, as moderate voters discount the authenticity of their commitment to such positions. We use a survey experiment to test this argument in Spain, finding evidence for discounting on the far right’s extreme anti-LGBTQ+ statements, but not on its embrace of authoritarian history. This study thus shows that normalization and stigmatization of the far right can change how its extreme positions are interpreted by voters.

Paul Staniland's remarkable book takes steps to unpack the complex relations between states and nonstate armed groups, which can take diverse forms and have very different implications for governance, state building, and violence. Far from the simple government versus rebel-group dichotomy, Staniland defends that there are various ways in which these actors interact and form “wartime orders.” As he puts it, he understands state-group relations as a spectrum rather than a dichotomy (88). The main factor underpinning such orders is government ideology, which will determine how much of a threat the government perceives a given group to constitute. Hence, ideology and, consequently, politics are put at the center of the explanation of state–rebel group relations. By doing this, the book defies numerous accounts (and theoretical models) of domestic armed strife that have discounted the centrality of politics in explaining their dynamics. It also makes a somewhat uncomfortable statement: states do not treat all their challengers equally. Staniland discusses the weight of history in ideological projects: there is a remarkable persistence of ideological projects and frames, which shape how states relate to nonstate groups. While this persistence is theoretically puzzling, it is empirically not surprising. Also, it resonates when trying to make sense of state behavior in the realm of conventional or mainstream politics (268).