Vlad Surdea-Hernea

🚨 Why do people protest against authoritarian regimes even when facing extreme danger? 🚨

In our new paper on Romania's 1989 Revolution, we find that communities exposed to the communist Gulag showed 5x higher dissent levels.

doi.org/10.1177/0010...

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The article is (now) published in Comparative Political Studies:

journals.sagepub.com/eprint/CAN8D...

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Process tracing, followed by a survey of Revolution participants provides further proof. A vast majority stated they were motivated by a "duty to participate" and it being the "right thing to do", while most did not believe regime change was possible at the outset.

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They were also more likely to vote against neo-communist presidential candidates in the 1992 and 2004 elections.

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These anti-communist norms persisted long after 1989. In the early 1990s, "Gulag localities" saw more anti-government protests against the communist successors.

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We also provide preliminary evidence for our norm-based mechanism. First, exposure to the Gulag is linked to lower membership in the Romanian Communist Party. People in these areas were less likely to join the party, even when it was beneficial to do so.

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The result is robust to different model specifications, sub-sample choices, causal identification strategies, and estimators that deal with both the distribution of the main variables and the spatial nature of the data. It also holds for alternative outcomes.

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Our key finding?

On average, localities with Gulag facilities had nearly 5 times more people seriously injured in confrontations with government forces during the Revolution (on average 3 injured, compared to a mean of 0.605).

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To test this, we examine one of the 20th century's most brutal episodes: the Romanian Gulag before 1965. We collect data on the distribution of labor camps, prisons, and extermination sites, matching it to the locality-level death and injury counts during the Revolution.

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This shifts the protesters' decision-making from a "logic of consequences" (risk-reward) to a "logic of appropriateness". Dissent becomes a moral duty, an expression of who they are and what their community stands for, regardless of the cost.

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To address this, we came up with a theory of repression-induced norm formation. We argue that exposure to extreme repression, like the Gulag, forges powerful, lasting anti-regime identities and social norms within communities.

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Romania's was the only violent anti-communist revolution in 1989, with thousands either killed or injured. Yet protests grew monotonically with violence: the more the army shot, the more people joined. This is hard to explain using a purely consequentialist logic.

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🚨 Why do people protest against authoritarian regimes even when facing extreme danger? 🚨

In our new paper on Romania's 1989 Revolution, we find that communities exposed to the communist Gulag showed 5x higher dissent levels.

doi.org/10.1177/0010...

1/🧵

And more about collider bias than you hear in most such courses, if my memory of the class from the early Covid era is correct.

Isn't clustering on a discrete running variable deemed generally problematic? I think Kolesár and Rothe (2018) show this, and there are some alternative estimators for CIs they propose in the RDHonest package.

A firm that makes a particular type of cosmetics?

I also now use it to upload nicely formatted figures and ask it to use my raw R results to produce something similar.

Is EB Garamond the boring and mainstream answer?

To be fair, that's partly because the analysis rarely discusses the margin of error in any depth. This gives the impression that the uncertainty that people naturally associate with sampling is not properly addressed.

That's one the cleanest applications of mediation analysis I have seen in applied work, great paper!

Sounds to me like an ideal scenario for a vignette/conjoint to also measure the relative importance of different features of the estimators in the researcher's choice.

Taking this a step further, I would be curious to know how political scientists would choose their estimator given this information. It seems to me that we are in a race to keep up with the literature (e.g. DiD) without being critical of what the real benefits are of moving away from the basics.