CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Surdea-Hernea, Vlad |
|---|---|
| Title | Remembrance of Violence Past: Essays on the Historical Legacy of Political Violence |
| Summary | This dissertation examines how political violence creates persistent legacies that shape long-term political behaviour. Combining quantitive causal inference tools with historical evidence in three European case studies, I demonstrate how violence embeds in community structures, influencing electoral choices, protests, and policy preferences long after perpetrators and victims are gone. The effects persist via distinct but potentially complementary mechanisms: weaponizing collective memory, forming anti-regime norms, and altering civil society infrastructure. The dissertation consists of three papers, each as a separate chapter. In the first paper, I explore how community-level war losses affect long-term electoral behaviour. Using a dataset geolocating all French soldiers who died in World War I, I show that communities with higher death rates exhibit greater electoral support for the far-right. I provide a theoretical explanation, supported by empirical evidence, of how these persistent effects propagate: communities more exposed to war horrors develop stronger in-group preferences over out-groups. In France, where the in-group is primarily national, this translates into higher demand for nationalism, supplied by far-right parties. In the second paper, together with my co-author, we examine how exposure to political repression shapes collective behaviour and dissent in high-threat environments. We develop a theory of repression-induced norm formation, arguing that proximity to repressive institutions fosters anti-regime identities and increases dissident behaviour, even when dissent remains costly. Using original data on the Romanian Gulag, we show that localities hosting labour camps or extermination sites during communism experienced disproportionately more severe injuries during the 1989 Revolution—a phenomenon not explained by the composition of the repressive apparatus. We provide both quantitative and qualitative mechanistic evidence that this effect is partly driven by anti-communist norms developed in response to the Gulag, not merely by shifts in political opportunities. Finally, in the third paper, I investigate whether exposure to authoritarian rule, which often suppresses pro-environmental groups threatening regime stability, has lasting effects after democratization. Empirically, I exploit Germany's post-WWII division into a liberal democracy and a Soviet-style autocracy using a geographic regression discontinuity design. I show that districts in the former East have lower climate policy equilibrium levels; climate-ambitious parties receive less electoral support. These effects are independent of East Germans' preferences in other conflicts and are observed within the East, suggesting a direct, persistent impact of authoritarianism on environmental attitudes. Moreover, I show that this legacy increases polarization over climate policies, making the former East Germany fertile ground for climate-sceptical parties. |
| Supervisor | Dorsch, Michael |
| Department | Political Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/surdea-hernea_vlad.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University