Paper of Eren Arbatli in European Economic Review

Congratulations to Eren Arbatli, assistant professor of the Department of Theoretical Economics, on the publication of his paper "Voting retrospectively: Critical junctures and party identification" in the European Economic Review.

Below is a short summary of the paper.

In this paper we offer evidence for highly retrospective voting. We trace the origins of party identification to historical gratitude towards a political movement and demonstrate how such gratitude can persist in the collective memory of citizens.

There are many instances where historical shocks left a persistent mark on the political behavior of affected groups. Take the Republican support by the Vietnamese- and Cuban-Americans or strongly pro-Democrat preferences among African Americans in the U.S. to name a few. Yet, it is not easy to empirically disentangle historical and contemporary drivers of voting behavior.

To make progress, we study a historical episode from Armenian national liberation struggle in the Ottoman Empire using a novel village-level data we have compiled. We investigate the long-term effects of the armed support the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) gave to Armenians of Sasun region during the resistance to Ottoman forces and the assistance it provided to Genocide survivors from Sasun as they settle to Russian Armenia.

We find that villages with Sasun ancestry exhibit a persistently higher support for the ARF than other villages without Sasun ancestry. Our field work in selected villages suggests that local history of Sasun plays a crucial role here. For more systematic evidence, we analyze first names of voting age residents. We show that descendants of Sasun migrants are more likely to name their sons after ARF rebels who fought in Sasun region and helped Sasun refugees escape into Russian Armenia.

Representation of these “special” names is significantly higher for the cohort born during the Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994) than previous or later cohorts. It seems that the war strengthened patriotic feelings and reinforced historical gratitude for ARF heroes. Moreover this cohort effect is visible only among residents of Sasun-ancestry villages and nowhere else! The figure below shows how the relative prevalence of first names of ARF-affiliated heroes who were active in Sasun region evolves across birth-cohorts.

One take-away from our research is that providing security, relief and on-the-ground support to civilians, whose lives and livelihoods are under threat, can enable political organizations or armed groups to cultivate a strong and long- lasting support base. A second take-away is that collective memories about critical events can persist and motivate political choices of later generations. This also implies that prompting positive memories about the party might be an effective campaigning strategy.

References:

Arbatli, C. E., & Gomtsyan, D. (2019). “Voting Retrospectively: Critical Junctures and Party Identification”. European Economic Review. Volume 119, 2019, pp. 356-390.