The power of communities : the political consequences of the interplay between individuals and contexts

Abstract

How do communities influence individual preferences and behaviour? In four different papers, I present compelling evidence suggesting that individual political preferences and behaviour need to be studied into context. I focus on four different political outcomes and by looking at how community-level characteristics influence the process of preferences formation and how individuals behave in four different con- texts. The first paper shows that local community’s economic performance and social capital levels qualify how individuals respond to experiencing income losses. Employing comparative and Italian survey and administrative data, I show that income loss in declining communities is especially detrimental to mainstream parties sup- port when communities are tightly interconnected and social capital is high. In the second paper, I argue that local and family history has long lasting influence on local memory with relevant political implications. Employing original survey data combined with archival and administrative data, I show that local history of a positive experience under the authoritarian regime is especially important for the persistence of revisionist counter-narratives holding positive memories of the fascist regime. In the third paper, focusing on the surge of an anti-far-right social movement, I show that local grassroots mobilization has spillovers effects on local communities’ sup- port for far-right parties’ performance. Employing municipality-level data on elect- oral results, anti-far-right mobilization and far-right rallies, I exploit a difference-in- differences design to identify the effect of local exposure to anti-far-right mobilization on the municipal electoral performance of far-right parties. Finally, in the last paper I present experimental evidence that individuals are responsive to information on their community’s collective action patterns. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, employing an original survey experiment, I show that individuals update their expectations in response to information, and that leads them to update specific dimensions of their social policy preferences.