The politics of commemoration and decommemoration

Abstract

In recent years, we have seen an increase in public discussions regarding how democracies should deal with, and celebrate, their past. This thesis studies how public commemorations of the past are used by elites and citizens, and how they influence attitudes and behavior. At the elite level, I argue that political leaders have an interest in disseminating their preferred narrative for political gains. At the citizen level, I argue that attitudes, emotions and behaviors are influenced by exposure to memory objects, which citizens also use to make inferences that shape their beliefs about the world. I test these arguments using state-of-the-art causal inference methods. Using a regression discontinuity, Paper 1 finds that public spaces do not simply follow citizens’ preferences. Instead, political elites manipulate public commemorations to reflect their ideological preferences. Paper 2 uses an experiment to check how places of memory affect citizens. Using a video of an unnamed American town, the experiment manipulates whether individuals are exposed or not the town’s Confederate commemorations. The findings show that citizens use the commemorations to infer information about the residents and elites of that town, and that those monuments and place names affect their emotions, attitudes, and behavior. Finally, Paper 3 uses a different experiment to test whether exposure to monuments can foster tolerance. The treatment exposes respondents to German Stolpersteine placed on the ground, close to the residence of victims of the Nazi regime. The findings show that even these small monuments can significantly affect emotions. Although results are mixed, the stones may be effective in promoting the inclusion of groups that face the most intolerance, but may also cause backlash within some groups. These findings show that public commemorations condition how individuals make up their minds about social and political groups, and that they are used strategically by elites.