Historical Legacies of Interethnic Competition: Anti-Semitism and the EU Referendum in Poland
Comparative Political Studies. 2015, Vol. 48(13) 1711–1745
41 Pages Posted: 21 Aug 2014 Last revised: 18 Sep 2017
Date Written: August 17, 2014
Abstract
How do historical legacies shape contemporary political attitudes and behavior? The paper proposes a novel attitudinal mechanism through which a distant history of interethnic competition may influence political outcomes in the present. I theorize that outgroup-focused framing of a policy issue can interact with historically conditioned outgroup predispositions at the local level, affecting policy preferences. Using Poland as a test case, the article shows that subnational variation in EU support in the 2003 EU membership referendum was produced in part by the interaction of national-level anti-Semitic framing of the EU and local historically determined prevalence of anti-Semitism. I demonstrate that the anti-Semitic cues promulgated by radical parties resonated with the voters concentrated in the areas with historically large Jewish populations. Even though Jews were virtually eliminated during WWII, latent negative attitudes toward the Jewish outgroup have persisted in these localities and were instrumentalized by political entrepreneurs who sought to mobilize opposition to European integration. The paper also explores alternative structural pathways through which the Holocaust may have affected political preferences.
Keywords: ethnicity, group conflict, historical legacies, long-term persistence, framing effects, EU integration
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation