Seminario Standing up against Autocracy - Nationalistic propaganda, shifting narratives and the mobilization of civilians

Abstract

Individuals sometimes take extraordinary personal risks to resist and fight autocracy. Material incentives alone fail to explain these life-threatening decisions. This paper provides evidence of the significant role immaterial incentives play in motivating resistance to autocratic propaganda by examining the formation of oppositional identities in the first half of the 20th-century in Italy. We reconstruct the history of Italian families in the period spanning WWI and the rise of Fascism until the Civil War during WWII. Leveraging novel data and a quasi-natural experiment, the analysis isolates the impacts of a nationalistic propaganda campaign on individual decisions to stand up against Fascism. We find that the propaganda that pushed a distorted narrative with a nationalistic retelling of the Great War clashed with family histories of grievance and loss, fostering the expression of early individual dissent. In the longer-term, these deep family clashes got re-activated with the outbreak of the civil war, boosting individual participation in the armed rebellion. The evidence also suggests a role of the tiny minority of individuals who took the risks of expressing dissent during the 1920's in favoring the emergence of oppositional social identities that eventually led to the demise of the Fascist regime during the 1940's.