The long-term effects of war exposure on civic engagement

Abstract

What are the legacies of war exposure on civic engagement? Recent evidence suggests that domestic war may have short-term effects on participation in social organizations. Yet, it is unclear whether these effects will be present in internationalized conflicts and persist over long periods of time. Further, the pathways of persistence by which war exposure leads to greater civic engagement in the long term are even less understood. In this paper, I contribute to both questions using unique evidence from the Vietnam War. Empirically, I combine a unique US military dataset containing bombing intensity with respondents’ wartime place of residence to generate an objective indicator of conflict intensity. Then, I exploit the distance to the arbitrarily drawn border at the 17th parallel as an instrument for conflict intensity. The results show that individuals who lived in a province heavily affected by the conflict during the war tend to be more engaged in social organizations and hold greater expressive values, at least 26 y later. Further, I empirically explore the mechanisms of persistence. The empirical evidence suggests that both persistence within individuals and community-wide transmission jointly account for the long-term increase of civic engagement after conflict.

Civil Wars as Critical Junctures: Theoretical Grounding and Empirical Applications

“…Whether or not rebel organizations create political parties after civil wars, wartime processes can durably shift identities and patterns of political and social participation in society (Balcells 2011(Balcells , 2017Barceló 2021;Bauer et al 2016). Blattman (2009) found a positive effect of civil war violence exposure in northern Uganda, in the form of abduction and forced conscription, on later electoral participation and community leadership, following up surveys with interviews demonstrating how the experiences of abductees in the crucible of war changed their mentality and visions of their place in society.…”

Remote learning during the war: challenges for higher education in Ukraine

“…The long-term effects of war exposure on civic engagement were studied by Joan Barceló who defined short-term and long-term effects of war [11].…”

Political Responsiveness to Conflict Victims: Evidence from a Countrywide Audit Experiment in Colombia

“… 1 We acknowledge that an intense debate remains on whether wartime exposure leads to greater political engagement. Unlike the robust evidence on the effects on group participation (Barceló 2021; Bauer et al 2016), some studies have not replicated those earlier findings on the effects of wartime violence on political engagement in a variety of cases (Bauer, Fiala, and Levely 2018; Cassar, Grosjean, and Whitt 2013), or have shown their gendered-dependency (Hadzic and Tavits 2019) or context-dependency (Voytas and Crisman 2021). …”