Stalin’s terror and the long-term political effects of mass repression

Abstract

Repression has a long-term negative effect on political participation. Using millions of arrest records from archival documents, and polling station-level election results, we examine how exposure to Stalin-era repression affects voter turnout in Putin’s Russia. To estimate the effect of repression on voting, we exploit exogenous variation in repression due to the structure of mid-century Soviet railroads, and travel distances to prison camps. We find that communities more heavily repressed under Stalin are less likely to vote today. The electoral legacy of Stalin’s terror – decades after the Soviet collapse, and across multiple election cycles (2003–12) – is systematically lower turnout. To show that our result is not unique to the Putin regime, we replicate our analysis in Ukraine (2004–14), and find similar patterns. These results highlight the negative consequences of repression for political behavior, and challenge the emerging view that exposure to violence increases political engagement. While past research has emphasized the short-term effects of repression over several months or years, we show that these effects may be durable over generations and even changes of political regime. Our findings also demonstrate that repression need not be collective or indiscriminate to have community-level effects.

Mass Repression and Political Loyalty: Evidence from Stalin’s ‘Terror by Hunger’

“…Nothing close to such consensus exists on the impact of indiscriminate mass repression. 2 Using equally plausible theories and empirical designs, past research has argued two seemingly conflicting points: indiscriminate repression induces obedience toward the perpetrator (Lyall, 2009;García-Ponce and Pasquale, 2015;Zhukov and Talibova, 2018;Young, 2018), or repression inflames adversarial sentiments and mobilizes opposition (Kocher, Pepinsky and Kalyvas, 2011;Balcells, 2012;Finkel, 2015;Lupu and Peisakhin, 2017;Rozenas, Schutte and Zhukov, 2017).…”

Deaths and Disappearances in the Pinochet Regime: A New Dataset

“…We believe our data open new topics of research. For instance, Lupu and Peisakhin (2017), Rozenas et al (2017) and Zhukov and Talibova (2018) highlight that state repression has enduring e ects on political preferences and social attitudes. Researchers can test whether the Pinochet regime has caused similar attitudinal changes in direct or indirect victims.…”

Disappearing dissent? Repression and state consolidation in Mexico

“…While in absolute terms 800 victims in a country with 58 million citizens in 1973 (the beginning of the period under study) may seem small, we argue and provide suggestive evidence that the local dynamics of state repression unleashed path-dependent processes of state consolidation that endure today. The next section develops our argument about how state repression can produce variation in contemporary levels of state consolidation across five core functions: exercising control over 1 A few exceptions include Lupu & Peisakhin (2017), Rozenas et al (2017), Costalli & Ruggeri (2017), Zhukov & Talibova (2018).…”