Abstract
We study how squad violence in post-WWI Italy shaped political-electoral incentives both in the short and in the long run. We build a novel dataset on political violence in 1919-1924 from official sources, which allows us to identify some 17,000 episodes with granular data on the location, timing and information on the perpetrator and the victim. About three quarters of the clashes involve Fascist militants. First, we use the dataset to assess the validity of long-standing explanations for the rise of the Fascist regime, providing evidence that both the "Red Scare" and the "Brutalization of Politics" played a role in the birth of the dictatorship. Subsequently, we argue that the memory of Fascist attacks in the 1920s contributed in shaping the patterns of Resistance episodes during WW2. Moreover, we show that municipality targeted by squad expeditions in 1920-22 shifted towards early anti-Fascist factions at the expense of catholic and moderate ones, persistently supporting left-wing parties from 1946 onwards.