Interregional Contact and National Identity

Abstract

We study the long-run effects of contact with individuals from other regions on beliefs, preferences and national identity. We combine a natural experiment, the random assignment of male conscripts to different locations throughout Spain, with tailored survey data. Being randomly assigned to complete military service outside of one's region of residence fosters contact with conscripts from other regions, and increases sympathy towards people from the region of service, measured several decades later. We also observe an increase in identification with Spain for individuals originating from regions with peripheral nationalism. Our evidence suggests that intergroup exposure in early adulthood can have long-lasting effects on individual preferences and national identity.

The Immigrant Next Door: Exposure, Prejudice, and Altruism

“…Given the selection issues inherent to most observational designs studying contact, much work in this literature takes the form of randomized experiments. 6 Other papers exploit natural experiments, such as the random assignment of roommates or classmates (Boisjoly et al, 2006;Rao, 2019;Carrell et al, 2019;Corno et al, 2019;Scacco and Warren, 2018), the random composition of military bootcamp cohorts (Dahl et al, 2020;Finseraas and Kotsadam, 2017) or the random assignment of province or country for military or missionary deployment (Bagues and Roth, 2020;Crawfurd, 2020). An important theme is this literature persistence: some studies (Bazzi et al, 2019;Bagues and Roth, 2020) find that effects persist over years or decades, while others (e.g.…”

The Immigrant Next Door: Long-Term Contact, Generosity, and Prejudice

“…Given the selection issues inherent to most observational designs studying contact, much of this literature relies on randomized experiments. 3 Other papers exploit natural experiments, such as the random assignment of roommates or classmates (Boisjoly et al, 2006;Rao, 2019;Carrell et al, 2019;Corno et al, 2019;Scacco and Warren, 2018), the random composition of military bootcamp cohorts (Dahl et al, 2020;Finseraas and Kotsadam, 2017) or the random assignment of province or country for military or missionary deployment (Bagues and Roth, 2020;Crawfurd, 2020). 4 One important theme in this literature is persistence.…”

“…4 One important theme in this literature is persistence. Some studies (Schindler and Westcott, 2020;Bazzi et al, 2019;Bagues and Roth, 2020) find that the effects of contact persist over long periods, while others (Dahl et al, 2020;Enos, 2014) find that effects fade out relatively quickly. Recent work has also explored heterogeneity: contact may lead to more positive social preferences in some contexts while having no effects or even negative effects in others.…”