🚨 New Paper Update 🚨.We have an updated version of our paper of the effect of the Romanian Gulag: . Expanded theory, causal mechanisms, etc. 🎙️Plus, thanks to NotebookLM, we now have a podcast-like summary of our argument and results! Check it out!.

RT @Kasparov63: Never doesn't last as long as it used to.

RT @Prashant_Garg_: Public trust in science is more important than ever. But what happens when scientists openly share their political opin….

RT @EPSRjournal: 🆕 Echoes from the trenches.🇫🇷 Using novel data that identifies & geolocates all French soldiers who died during WWI, @vlad….

RT @ApsgWorkshop: Joi us today Nov 5 for a great workshop!.@vlad_surdea (@ceu) will present "The Repression-Dissent Nexus in High-Threat En….

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Looking forward to discussing one of my favourite projects.

RT @CUP_PoliSci: New to @APSA_Preprints -. The repression-dissent nexus in high-threat environments: Evidence from communist Romania - http….

RT @Jan_Vogler: 🚨 Call for Papers: Historical Political Economy 🚨. In the 2024-2025 academic year, @dmkofanov, @tinepaulsen, & I will conti….

Does political violence mobilise dissidents in an environment where the government is likely to further repress dissent? . 🚨In a new paper🚨 , we look at the persistent effects of the Romanian Gulag on participation in the anti-communist Revolution of 1989. A summary thread👇.

Bottom line: Repression can inflame opposition even in high-threat environments. For this to happen, the repression must be severe enough to create enduring norms within the victimised communities. First draft available here:.

Drawing on a wide range of historical sources, most of them local, as well as memoirs published in the early 1990s, we show that, at least in the early stages, the Revolution was driven by deep-seated norms of anti-communism rather than by strategic grievances.

We then conduct theory-testing process tracing in a pathway case, Timișoara, selected using a causal forest algorithm. We test the presence of our mechanism against rival hypotheses that would be consistent with the rational choice theories that dominate the current literature.

Two quotes from the interviews:. "My family was sent to Baragan [mass deportation colony], I wanted to shout their pain, my own didn’t matter" . "After what they [the communists] did to my family, I finally had a chance to get them".

As a first piece of evidence, we conduct a very small survey of people injured during the revolution, and some follow-up interviews. We do not claim information saturation, but the results clearly favour our norm-based mechanism.

We credibly show that extreme repression can lead to dissent even in high-threat environments. But does this happen, as we theorise, because people act according to a logic of appropriateness based on anti-communist norms?.

The results are robust to different model specifications, spatial controls, and preprocessing algorithms, and are not sensitive to unobservables. More importantly, we show that Gulag facilities were not located where resistance movements were active before the communist takeover:

This enables us to isolate the variation in Gulag placement driven by logistics, rather than politics. We use this variation in an instrumental variable setting which confirms our previous findings:

We also take advantage of the fact that Gulag facilities were established gradually, only in regions where there were no other facilities active, but where there was an available building stock for the communist regime to use.

Leveraging the (credible!) as-if-random distribution of Gulag facilities, we show that, on average, two more people were seriously injured during the anti-communist revolution in places with Gulag facilities than in places without such facilities.