Long Shadow of the Past: Identity, Norms, and Political Behavior

History is widely known to have an important influence on politics, yet it remains poorly understood how historical processes affect contemporary political behavior. In this project I demonstrate that historically rooted political identities remain salient much after institutions that originally gave rise to them have disappeared. I also show that differences in political attitudes and behaviors arising out of differences in historical identities persist in identical institutional and material environments. In other words, I demonstrate that identities rooted in the past can be more important in guiding political behavior than material or institutional factors in the present. To make this point I draw on evidence from a natural experiment that unfolded in Ukraine over the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1770s, a homogenous population of ethnic Ukrainians found itself divided between Austrian and Russian Empires through an accident of history. In 1939, that population was reunited within Soviet Ukraine. In the intervening one and a half centuries Ukrainian subjects of the Austrian and Russian empires were subject to widely divergent, often explicitly antithetic, state-sponsored identity-building projects. I explore the political aftereffects of these 150 years of divergent historical trajectories. Harnessing survey findings from 247 settlements (1,675 respondents) located within the maximum distance of 15 miles of the long-defunct Austrian-Russian imperial border, and drawing on extensive fieldwork and archival research I demonstrate that individuals residing either side of the former imperial frontier are still today very different from one another in their political attitudes and behaviors. They vote for different parties, hold diverging views on both Ukraine's past and its future and do not see eye to eye when it comes to the practice of collective property ownership. The magnitude of differences between settlements that were subject to identical conditions in the Soviet and post-Soviet world and that are located a stone's throw from one another run in the range of 10-45 percentage points. I make use of pre-Soviet institutional variation between the populations under study to demonstrate how churches and schools were the mechanisms by which lasting political identities were created and sustained. I also argue that political identities tend to persist as long as elites that shaped these identities, and who play a vital role in day-to-day identity policing, persist. Although the evidence is drawn exclusively from a historical experiment that unfolded in western Ukraine, this project has major theoretical implications for the study of politics in both developing and developed societies. What I show is that individuals do not respond to changes in material and institutional incentives in a predictable fashion because their behavior is often a product of historically rooted political identities. Voting, support for democracy and the rule of law, and many economic practices, among other things, are all phenomena that might be driven by identity politics. In turn, identity politics can only be understood through a careful study of history.