The Effects of Wars on Political Identities: Explaining Ideological Change and Continuity after the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).

How are political identities affected by civil wars? Scholars of violence tend to treat societies as constant over time. Yet civil wars can be transformative: they can change preferences of citizens, they can create new incentives and constraints, and they can provide new contexts of interaction that are likely to alter individual political behavior. In this paper, I make an exploratory analysis of ideological alignments of localities that experienced the Spanish Civil War using a large-n database with 1,062 Catalan municipalities, and I try to see the effect that lethal violence and external refugee flows during war had on their change or continuity. One finding of the paper is that the so-called "1939 exile", which affected many people and families identified by the political left, can be partly explanatory of the switch to the right of many Catalan municipalities in the post-war era, but not totally. At moderate levels, 1939 exile had a significant positive effect on 1977 elections' leftist support. This is supportive of the idea that displacement can be a form of victimization, which can provoke resentment against the responsible group in the post-war period. The latter has implications for the logic of displacement of armed groups. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]