1 – Bombing and Memory: World War II Aerial Bombings and the Long-term Impact of Historical Narratives in Germany
Leslie Fischer
University of St. Gallen
Abstract: Exposure to violence has been identified as a factor influencing political attitudes. In this study, we argue that elite interpretations and reinterpretations of exposure to violence can have a profound and lasting impact on political attitudes and play a central role in shaping electoral outcomes. We test our theoretical argument using the case of Germany. During World War II, the Royal Air Force (RAF) bombed Germany indiscriminately, yet political elites in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) took different approaches to dealing with the legacy of the bombings. While the former depoliticized the bombings, the latter framed them as a threat to their socialist identity. We empirically test whether the different narratives have persistent effects on the vote share of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a nativist political party in Germany, in the 2021 federal election. Our spatially lagged regression models show that the AfD’s reinterpretation of the bombings creates a mismatch with both historical narratives, resulting in a lower AfD vote share, with the effect being strongest in the former GDR. Moreover, using sentiment analysis, we find a remarkable regional contrast between the FRG and the GDR in the way newspapers cover the World War II bombings in Germany (2018-2024). This case study provides valuable insights into the complex interplay between historical events, their interpretation, and the contemporary political landscape.
2 – Zitti e buoni: Assessing Public Perception Shifts Following Civilian Victimization.
Filippo Pasquali
University of St. Gallen
Abstract: Do countries lose sympathy when they cause civilian casualties? This study examines the effect of civilian casualties on public perceptions of a country involved in an armed conflict. Specifically, we test two competing hypotheses: whether Western audiences’ evaluations of a nation remain stable regardless, or whether they elicit sympathy or disapproval responses. We introduce a new and practical tool for measuring Western public sentiment on a daily basis by exploiting the rationality of Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) betting odds, and we construct a novel dataset that measures the salience of civilian casualties in an armed conflict based on news coverage (2017-2022). This allows us to construct an expected value for the ESC odds of countries experiencing or perpetrating civilian casualties in the absence of such events, effectively creating a treated group and a synthetic control group. We test our theory by selecting the polarized and entrenched Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where changes in public perceptions of Israel following civilian casualties are least likely to occur. Nevertheless, our results show that European public perceptions of Israel are sensitive to civilian casualties. Specifically, when reports of Israeli civilian casualties appear after a period of low attention to civilian killings, we observe an increase in bets for Israel on the ESC. Conversely, European audiences are less likely to bet on Israel in the ESC following reports of Palestinian casualties. We validate our approach using the Russo-Ukrainian and Nagorno-Karabakh armed conflicts. Overall, our results suggest that European audiences exhibit heightened sensitivity to incidents of civilian casualties.
3 – Demands and Intractability: How Issue Complexity Impacts Civil War Termination and Postwar Durability
Cornelius Haritz
German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA Hamburg)
Investigating the sustainability of civil war termination remains a crucial question in conflict research. Between 2003 and 2015, all civil wars (except of Libya) were recurrences of previous fighting. While it has been theoretically assumed that complexity exacerbates intractability, the relationship between conflict complexity, termination type, and postwar durability remains empirically underexplored. This paper fills the gap by examining how the complexity of conflict issues influences the type of war termination and subsequently affects postwar longevity. Utilizing the innovative UCDP Conflict Issues Dataset (Brosché & Sundberg, 2023) and the UCDP Conflict Termination Dataset (Kreutz, 2010), I employ logistic regression analysis to determine if issue complexity shapes the type of civil war termination. Subsequent survival analysis assesses how issue complexity, in conjunction with termination type, impacts postwar duration. I compile an original measurement of complexity, comprising the number, salience, and totality of issues in civil war dyads.