Abstract
We study the long-term political consequences of wartime atrocities and postwar impunity. Our setting is the Italian occupation of Yugoslavia during the Second World War, where Italian forces committed large-scale war crimes. After 1945, most perpetrators avoided extradition and resettled across Italy. We construct two novel datasets: (i) a geolocated record of Italian war crimes in Yugoslavia, and (ii) the residential distribution of identified war criminals concealed from extradition in postwar Italy. We show that the local presence of unpunished war criminals shaped Italian political behavior in the second half of the twentieth century: municipalities with higher densities of perpetrators exhibited persistently stronger support for Christian Democracy, and later for anti-establishment parties such as Forza Italia and Lega. Across the border, we find that exposure to Italian war crimes in Yugoslavia reduced long-run trust in institutions, with effects persisting in survey data from Slovenia. Our results highlight the enduring political costs of wartime atrocities and the failure of transitional justice, with implications for understanding both democratic consolidation and contemporary political polarization.
Local Organizer: Luigi Alberto Franzoni