Vlad Surdea-Hernea

1/18 🚨 Why do some far-right candidates succeed by openly praising fascist movements?

In my (very new) working paper, I look at Romania’s 2024 presidential election, where Călin Georgescu won the first round. I argue that historical "consensual mobilization" creates persistent local memories. 🗳️👇

18/18 You can read the full working paper here (Appendix to come very soon):

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/c8hwa...

17/18 These (preliminary) findings suggest we need to rethink how authoritarian legacies work.

It is not just the violence that leaves a mark. By providing public goods, extremist movements can build a consensual legacy that lies in wait, ready to be weaponized by the right political entrepreneur.

16/18 But was this legacy always active, and did all far-right candidates benefit from it? Using the 2000 election, I show Georgescu unlocked a unique effect. His specific neo-legionary framing activated dormant sympathies that previous nationalists like Vadim Tudor failed to fully tap.

15/18 The key question, that we sometimes forget to ask in legacy studies, is then how did this memory survive for 80 years? I find three local carriers/mechanisms: Orthodox churches, nationalist NGOs, and street names. Places that hosted camps have significantly more of these "physical anchors".

14/18 Finally, extensive checks confirm the robustness of the main findings. The results hold when dropping any single spatial grid cell or trimming outliers. A placebo test using distance to 1936 universities shows no relationship, ruling out broad developmental confounders.

13/18 But could unobservable factors explain this? Unlikely. Selection on unobservables would need to be 3x stronger than observables to nullify the result. I also control for key rival explanations, including interwar economic development and agrarian party strength, without altering the findings.

12/18 I address spatial interference thoroughly. Beyond a "donut" design that excludes immediate neighbors, I run placebos on untreated rings and control for the average political leanings of the neighborhood. The camp effect remains distinct, ruling out diffusion as the alternative explanation.

11/18 But is this just a boost to the general far-right sentiment? No. When comparing Georgescu to rival George Simion (who avoided Iron Guard symbolism), camp localities specifically broke for Georgescu. Voters recognized and responded to the specific historical signal over generic populism.

10/18 Some tests for heterogeneity further supports my theory. The effect of the camps is concentrated in rural areas, where face-to-face networks preserve memory best. In urban centers, where populations churn and narratives dilute, the legacy effect fades significantly.

9/18 The results are quite telling (and robust!). Localities that hosted Iron Guard camps showed 1.06 to 1.19 percentage points higher support for Georgescu compared to their direct neighbors. In a tight race, this legacy vote translated to over 100,000 votes, quite a decisive margin.

8/18 Nevertheless, I employ entropy balancing to address selection bias. I reweight neighbor localities to match camp sites on traits like interwar far-right voting, university distance, Greek-Catholic counts, imperial history, early schooling, trade routes, ethnicity, borders & battles.

7/18 Why does this comparison work? The 1931 borders were drawn by decentralized commissions for land registries, not political sorting. These boundaries had low salience, making it implausible that camp placement was targeted relative to the inter-locality border line itself.

6/18 To isolate the causal effect of the public goods provided by the far-right in the 1930s, I compiled data on 274 Iron Guard camps. I use a boundary-matched design with grid-cell fixed effect to compare camp localities strictly to their immediate neighbors within the same spatial block.

5/18 Fast forward to 2024, when Călin Georgescu acted as a mnemonic entrepreneur for the far-right, explicitly mimicking the Iron Guard template. He praised their leaders, quoted their manifestos, and even staged visuals—like riding a white horse in peasant clothes—to mirror their propaganda.

4/18 I further theorise that such memories are dormant until activated. Thus, the infrastructure built in the 1930s doesn't automatically generate far-right votes. Instead, it makes these communities "activatable" when a politician connects those specific historical symbols to modern grievances

3/18 I claim this created a "mnemonic infrastructure" of the movement as builders and helpers, not just criminals. Between 1932 and 1937, these camps operated nationwide. You can see the density of this network in the map below, showing where the Iron Guard established a physical footprint.

2/18 Most research on the legacy of fascism focuses on violence and repression. However, we often overlook that these movements also provided public goods to gain legitimacy. In the 1930s, the Iron Guard ran education and work camps that (re)built churches and roads, and provided food to the poor.

1/18 🚨 Why do some far-right candidates succeed by openly praising fascist movements?

In my (very new) working paper, I look at Romania’s 2024 presidential election, where Călin Georgescu won the first round. I argue that historical "consensual mobilization" creates persistent local memories. 🗳️👇

🚨 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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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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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