The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations

press release: Please join us for the next in our Spring Lecture Series: Noam Lupu's lecture on “The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations." This lecture presents research on Crimea coauthored with Leonid Peisakhin (NYU Abu Dhabi). It asks whether political violence leaves a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors. The authors argue that violence shape the identities of victims and that families transmit these effects across generations. Inherited identities then impact the contemporary attitudes and behaviors of the descendants of victims. Testing these hypotheses is fraught with methodological challenges; to overcome them, the authors study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. A multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in conducted 2014 and led to findings that the descendants of individuals who suffered more intensely identify more strongly with their ethnic group, support more strongly the Crimean Tatar political leadership, hold more hostile attitudes toward Russia, and participate more in politics. The authors also find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization and provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants.

The Speaker:

Noam Lupu is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Trice Faculty Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include comparative political behavior, Latin American politics, political parties and partisanship, and class and inequality.

His research examines how contexts condition mass attitudes and behavior, and what impacts they in turn have on democratic representation. He focuses especially on features of politics in developing country contexts that are less prevalent in the advanced democracies on which most behavioral theories are based. Noam Lupu’s forthcoming book, Party Brands in Crisis, explores how the dilution of party brands eroded partisan attachments in Latin America and facilitated the collapse of established parties. Other ongoing projects examine the effects of inequality, violence, and corruption on political attitudes and vote choice, and the shortage of working-class policymakers around the world.

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Lecture is held at 4pm in 206 Ingraham Hall