War and social attitudes

Abstract

We study the long-run effects of conflict on social attitudes, with World War II in Central and Eastern Europe as our setting. Much of earlier work has relied on self-reported measures of victimization, which are prone to endogenous misreporting. With our own survey-based measure, we replicate established findings linking victimization to political participation, civic engagement, optimism, and trust. Those findings are reversed, however, when tested instead with an objective measure of victimization based on historical reference material. Thus, we urge caution when interpreting survey-based results from this literature as causal.

Displacement and the expectation of political violence: Evidence from Bosnia

“…If the unobserved confounder was that powerful, we should see a significant correlation between another variable that is affected by the pessimistic nature of respondents and the expectation of political violence. Yet Table 3 tells us that the history of victimization (of respondents) is only slightly correlated with the expectation of political violence, contrary to what Child and Nikolova (2018) argue. In addition, we can check whether respondents answered another question on hardship -their health conditions one year after displacement -in a way that produces a significant correlation with the expectation of political violence.…”

“…It is common to measure the history of victimization during conflict using respondents' selfreports of violence (Hartman and Morse, 2018;Hazlett, 2017;Hirsch-Hoefler et al, 2016), but Child and Nikolova (2018) raise a methodological concern about the use of self-reported measures of victimization in the study of war experiences and social attitudes. The more pessimistic people are, they argue, the more likely they are to remember the negative experiences.…”

Should I Signal Trust? Effect of Terrorism on Interpersonal Trust in Post-Conflict and Non-Post-Conflict Countries

“…They show that perceived threat tends to increase public preference for authoritarian leaders (Huddy et al 2005), forgo civil liberties (Hetherington and Suhay 2011), and increase electoral support for parties that are on the political right (Getmansky and Zeitzoff 2014). However, according to Child and Nikolova (2020), behavioral patterns based on a self-reported perception of vulnerability to being victimized by violence say more about individual personalities rather than the effect of actual violence. In other words, rather than the effect of violence, those who perceive, remember or exaggerate exposure to violent conflicts may be individuals who are politically engaged, less trusting, and pessimistic.…”

Long-term effects of political violence on political trust: Evidence from the case of the Gwangju Massacre in South Korea, 1980

“…More recently, by replicating Lupu and Peisakhin (2017), Wang and Carter (2022) found the opposite—legacy of violence is negatively associated with political engagement. In addition, there has been similar literature evaluating the short and long-term effects of violence on different aspects of social capital such as civic engagement (Barceló, 2021; Bellows and Miguel, 2009), social trust (Conzo and Salustri, 2019; Barclay and Nikolova, 2020), and trust in local and national political institutions (De Juan and Pierskalla, 2016; Gates and Justesen, 2020).…”