Elias Dinas

Can political exiles reshape the politics of the societies that receive them? Existing research on the political effects of migration has largely focused on how native populations react to migrants' presence rather than on migrants' capacity to shape local politics directly. We argue that political exiles, who often arrive with strong political identities and organizational experience, can instead act as agents of horizontal transmission within host societies. We examine this argument by studying the exile of nearly two hundred thousand Spanish Republicans to France following the Spanish Civil War. Leveraging newly digitized refugee records and a difference-in-differences design, we show that communes hosting larger numbers of refugees shifted significantly toward the French Communist Party (PCF) after World War II. We provide evidence that this effect partly operated through Resistance mobilization: communes receiving more Spanish Republicans experienced greater Resistance activity, which helped legitimize the PCF in the postwar period.

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.

Extant literature has arguably overlooked the impact of authoritarian ideological legacies on the shape of party systems in newly-established democracies. Most - if not all - autocracies are not ideologically neutral, but can be ascribed to ideological “brands” (Left/Right). These, in turn, serve as powerful heuristic cues in party competition. Combining insights from signaling theory and mnemonic politics, we argue that party elites in new democracies will try to distance themselves from the previous dictator’s ideological side in pursuit of legitimacy and in line with a spatial competition framework. Consistently, we show evidence of asymmetric fragmentation in the party systems of both former Left- and Right-Wing regimes, with fewer parties located on the dictator’s side. This difference persists in time, waning as party systems consolidate. Our analysis shows how such an escape from the stigma has substantive implications for the average ideological slant of the party system and its polarization.

Do dictatorships create an ideological backlash in new democracies? Existing evidence documents shifts in public opinion and party supply, but cannot distinguish genuine preference change from stigma attached to former regimes. We address this by focusing on the actors most vulnerable to such stigma: parties aligned with the Dictator’s ideological Side (DS). If backlash is genuine, parties’ policy platforms and the heuristics signaling them should shift in tandem; if stigma operates, heuristic signals should move more than policy. To isolate this divergence, we compare parties’ names - highly visible yet non-binding cues - to manifesto-based ideological positions. In a preregistered survey, 988 UK-based respondents guessed the ideology of 1,604 parties from 53 countries using only their English-translated names. Names are markedly less informative about "true" ideology in post-authoritarian regimes than in mature democracies; a gap driven by DS parties, systematically perceived as more centrist than their manifestos indicate.

For nearly as long as the rational voting paradox has puzzled scholars, it has been recognized that voters’ decisions are influenced by expressive motivations. Yet, since disentangling emotional from instrumental drivers remains an inherently difficult task, little is known about how voting on the former grounds can shape future political preferences. We fill this gap by focusing on a rare instance of expressive voting: support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1984 European election, preceded by the sudden death of PCI’s leader, Enrico Berlinguer. Via a Regression Discontinuity approach, exploiting differential expressive motives along the border(s) of Berlinguer’s electoral district, we show that municipal-level support for PCI increased more sharply in 1984 in areas where voters could express their preference for the just-deceased leader. Combining voting records and individual survey data, we further show how votes cast on expressive grounds in 1984 returned to PCI for about five years after Berlinguer’s death.

How do nations confront a history of past atrocities? Can public efforts to address the past shift private views, or do they merely establish social norms fostering the misrepresentation of stigmatized preferences? A prime example of confronting the past is post-war Germany, shaped by the legacy of Nazism's atrocities in World War II. Decades later, we examine how public recognition of collective guilt through discourse, education, and culture has shaped German identity and attitudes towards the country's history. Using a large online survey and an experimental treatment, we distinguish private preferences from their public expression. Our findings reveal that low national pride and muted emotional ties to German history are internalized rather than driven by social desirability. However, a stigma persists around publicly expressing a desire to move beyond a perpetrator-focused narrative. This study underscores both the potential and the limits of public recognition of a nation's historical sins.

How does anti-immigrant rhetoric by mainstream politicians affect norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? Drawing on experimental evidence, we find that statements by mainstream politicians lead to more norm erosion than similar statements by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggest that this is because statements by mainstream-right politicians erode norm perceptions of right-wing individuals, while those by radical-right politicians induce backlash among left-wing individuals, who hold closer to the norm in place. The latter effect (backlash by the left) disappears when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. We argue that this difference occurs because mainstream politicians represent the views of a larger part of the population or have a higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms, and that similar political statements can have different effects depending on their sender.

We perform the first mapping of the ideological positions of European parties using generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a “zero-shot” learner. We ask OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3.5 (GPT-3.5) to identify the more “right-wing” option across all possible duplets of European parties at a given point in time, solely based on their names and country of origin, and combine this information via a Bradley–Terry model to create an ideological ranking. A cross-validation employing widely-used expert-, manifesto- and poll-based estimates reveals that the ideological scores produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) closely map those obtained through the expert-based evaluation, i.e., CHES. Given the high cost of scaling parties via trained coders, and the scarcity of expert data before the 1990s, our finding that generative AI produces estimates of comparable quality to CHES supports its usage in political science on the grounds of replicability, agility, and affordability.

For nearly as long as the rational voting paradox has puzzled scholars, it has been recognized that voters' decisions are influenced by expressive motivations. Yet, since disentangling emotional from instrumental drivers remains an inherently difficult task, little is known about how voting on the former grounds can shape future political preferences. We fill this gap by focusing on a rare instance of expressive voting: support for the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1984 European election, preceded by the sudden death of PCI's leader, Enrico Berlinguer. Via a Regression Discontinuity approach, exploiting differential expressive motives along the border(s) of Berlinguer's electoral district, we show that municipal-level support for PCI increased more sharply in 1984 in areas where voters could express their preference for the just-deceased leader. Combining voting records and individual survey data, we further show how votes cast on expressive grounds in 1984 returned to PCI for about five years since Berlinguer's death.

Is anti-far-right grassroots mobilization effective? Scholars studying the far right have focused extensively on the causes and consequences of far-right success but have paid little attention to what citizens and civil society can do to tackle this phenomenon. Focusing on the surge of Sardine (the Sardines), an anti-far-right social movement, during the 2020 Italian regional elections, we test whether grassroots mobilization is an effective tool to curb far-right parties’ electoral performance. Employing municipality-level data on electoral results, Sardines rallies, and far-right events, we exploit a difference-in-differences design to identify the effect of local exposure to Sardine mobilization on the municipal electoral performance of far-right parties. The results suggest that local exposure to a Sardines event has a strong negative effect on far-right electoral results.