Names and behavior in a war
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Names and behavior in a war ˇ ep ˇ an ´ Jurajda1 St
· Dejan Kovaˇc2
Received: 6 May 2019 / Accepted: 22 May 2020 / © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence— using name choices corresponding to a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in exYugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war. Keywords Nationalism · Names · Intergenerational transmission JEL Classification D64 · D74 · Z1
Responsible editor: Klaus F. Zimmermann ˇ ep´an Jurajda Stˇ [email protected] Dejan Kovaˇc [email protected] 1
CERGE-EI, a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Politickych veznu 7, 111 21, Prague, Czech Republic
2
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA
S. Jurajda, D. Kovaˇc
1 Introduction Nationalism has been a principal driver of wars and of political violence throughout modern history (Petersen 2002; Biondich 2011). Wars, in turn, have dramatic, long-lasting effects on a country’s political, cultural, and ethnic identity, according to a recent body of work based in large part on voting behavior (Mayhew 2004; Bellows and Miguel 2009; Anderlini et al. 2010; Petersen 2012; Fontana et al. 2016; Rozenas et al. 2017). Experiencing war also strengthens in-group cooperation and altruism towards members of one’s group (Choi and Bowles 2007; Voors et al. 2012), i.e., preferences supportive of nationalism. A key unanswered question in the literature is to what extent the persistence of the effects of wars on political values and in-group cooperative behavior is underpinned by intergenerational transmission of values within families. It has been suggested that intergenerational transmission of political values affects economic development, political outcomes, and inter-group and inter-national tensions (e.g., Guiso et al. 2006; Dal B´o et al. 2009; Montgomery 2010, Voigtl¨ander and Voth 2015), but the study of the effects wars have on political attitud
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