Replication Data for: "Electoral Effects of Biased Media: Russian Television in Ukraine"

We use plausibly exogenous variation in the availability of the Russian analog television signal in Ukraine to study how a media source with a conspicuous political agenda impacts political behavior and attitudes. Using highly disaggregated election data and an original survey we estimate that Russian television substantially increased average electoral support for parties and candidates with a `pro-Russian' agenda in the 2014 presidential and parliamentary elections. Evidence suggests that this effect is attributable to persuasion rather than differential mobilization. The effectiveness of biased media varied in a politically consequential way: its impact was largest on voters with strong pro-Russian priors but was less effective, and to some degree even counter-effective, in persuading those with strong pro-Western priors. Our finding suggests that exposing an already polarized society to a biased media source can result in even deeper polarization

The Role of Communities in the Transmission of Political Values: Evidence from Forced Population Transfers

Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This article evaluates the role of community bonds in the long-term transmission of political values. At the end of World War II, Poland's borders shifted westward, and the population from the historical region of Galicia (now partly in Ukraine) was displaced to the territory that Poland acquired from Germany. In a quasi-random process, some migrants settled in their new villages as a majority group, preserving communal ties, while others ended up in the minority. The study leverages this natural experiment of history by surveying the descendants of these Galician migrants. The research design provides an important empirical test of the theorized effect of communities on long-term value transmission, which separates the influence of family and community as two competing and complementary mechanisms. The study finds that respondents in Galicia-majority settlements are now more likely to embrace values associated with Austrian imperial rule and are more similar to respondents whose families avoided displacement

Replication Data for: The Legacy of Political Violence across Generations

Does political violence leave a lasting legacy on identities, attitudes, and behaviors? We argue that violence shapes 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, we study the deportation of Crimean Tatars in 1944 and the indiscriminate way deportees died from starvation and disease. We conducted a multigenerational survey of Crimean Tatars in 2014 and find 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. But we find that victimization has no lasting effect on religious radicalization. We also provide evidence that identities are passed down from the victims of the deportation to their descendants

Replication Data for: Building Cooperation Among Groups in Conflict: An Experiment on Intersectarian Cooperation in Lebanon

Societies divided along ethnic or religious lines suffer from persistent conflict and underprovision of public goods. Scholarly understanding of how to strengthen intergroup cooperation remains limited. In this study, we set out to test the effectiveness of two interventions on intergroup cooperation: cross-group expert appeal and participation in a cross-group discussion. The laboratory-in-the-field experiment is set in Lebanon’s capital Beirut and involves interactions between 180 Shia and 180 Sunni Muslim participants. We find that the expert appeal increases intersectarian cooperation in settings that do not entail reciprocal exchange. On average, cross-sectarian discussions do not improve cooperation, but those discussions where participants delve deeply into the conflict’s causes and possible remedies are associated with greater cooperation. Neither intervention diminishes the effectiveness of sectarian clientelistic appeals. The policy implication of our study is that intergroup cooperation can be strengthened even in regions as bitterly divided as the Middle East