The Role of Communities in the Transmission of Political Values: Evidence from Forced Population Transfers Volha Charnysh ∗ and Leonid Peisakhin† This article evaluates the role of community bonds in the long-term transmission of political values. At the end of World War II, Poland’s borders shifted westward, and the population from the historical region of Galicia (now partly in Ukraine) was displaced to the territory that Poland acquired from Germany. In a quasi-random process, some migrants settled in their new villages as a majority group, preserving communal ties, while others ended up in the minority. The study leverages this natural experiment of history by surveying the descendants of these Galician migrants. The research design provides an important empirical test of the theorized effect of communities on long-term value transmission, which separates the influence of family and community as two competing and complementary mechanisms. The study finds that respondents in Galicia-majority settlements are now more likely to embrace values associated with Austrian imperial rule and are more similar to respondents whose families avoided displacement. Keywords: legacies, persistence, community, cultural values, forced migration, Poland, Habsburg Empire ∗Assistant Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
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[email protected] We are indebted for excellent comments to Avital Livny, Edmund Malesky, Didac Queralt, Arturas Rozenas, Peter van der Windt, Tomasz Zarycki, Christina Zuber, and to seminar participants at George Washington University, Juan March Institute, NYU-Abu Dhabi, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Washington University in St.