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Commemorating local victims of past atrocities and far-right support over time

  • Does public remembrance of past atrocities lead to decreased support for far-right parties today? Initiatives commemorating past atrocities aim to make visible the victims and crimes committed against them. This runs counter to revisionist actors who attempt to downplay or deny atrocities and victims. Memorials for victims might complicate such attempts and reduce support for revisionist actors. Yet, little empirical evidence exists on whether that happens. In this study, we examine whether exposure to local memorials that commemorate victims of atrocities reduces support for a revisionist far-right party. Our empirical case is the Stolpersteine (“stumbling stones”) memorial in Berlin, Germany. It commemorates victims and survivors of Nazi persecution in front of their last freely chosen place of residence. We employ time-series cross-sectional analyses and a discontinuity design using a panel dataset that matches the location and date of placement of new Stolpersteine with the election results from seven elections (2013 to 2021) at the level of polling station areas. We find that, on average, the presence of Stolpersteine is associated with a 0.96%-point decrease in the far-right vote share in the following election. Our study suggests that local memorials that make past atrocities visible have implications for political behavior in the present.

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Metadaten
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Author(s):Oguzhan Turkoglu, Ruth K. Ditlmann, Berenike Firestone
Parent Title (English):PNAS
Publication year:2023
Publishing Institution:Hertie School
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2221158120
Release Date:2023/07/04
Tag:Berlin; far-right; memorials; past atrocities
Volume:120
Issue:28
Article Number:e2221158120
AY 22/23:AY 22/23
Licence of document (German):Metadaten / metadata
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