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Guido Tabellini A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Gagliarducci, Stefano; Onorator, Massimiliano G.; Sobbrio, Francesco; Tabellini, Guido Enrico Working Paper War of the waves: Radio and resistance during World War II Working Paper, No. 66 Provided in Cooperation with: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza (DISCE) Suggested Citation: Gagliarducci, Stefano; Onorator, Massimiliano G.; Sobbrio, Francesco; Tabellini, Guido Enrico (2018) : War of the waves: Radio and resistance during World War II, Working Paper, No. 66, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza (DISCE), Milano This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/202840 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu UNIVERSITÀ CATTOLICA DEL SACRO CUORE Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza Working Paper Series War of the Waves: Radio and Resistance During World War II Stefano Gagliarducci, Massimiliano G. Onorato, Francesco Sobbrio, Guido Tabellini Working Paper n. 66 February 2018 War of the Waves: Radio and Resistance During World War II Stefano Gagliarducci Università di Roma Tor Vergata Massimiliano G. Onorato Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Francesco Sobbrio LUISS "G. Carli" Guido Tabellini Università Bocconi Working Paper n. 66 February 2018 Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore Largo Gemelli 1 - 20123 Milano – Italy tel: +39.02.7234.2976 - fax: +39.02.7234.2781 e-mail: [email protected] The Working Paper Series promotes the circulation of research results produced by the members and affiliates of the Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza, with the aim of encouraging their dissemination and discussion. Results may be in a preliminary or advanced stage. The Dipartimento di Economia e Finanza is part of the Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE) of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. War of the Waves: Radio and Resistance During World War II ∗ Stefano Gagliarducciy Massimiliano Gaetano Onoratoz Francesco Sobbriox Guido Tabellini{ February, 2018 Abstract What is the role of the media in coordinating and mobilizing insurgency against a foreign military occupation? We analyze this question in the context of the Nazi- fascist occupation of Italy during WWII. We study the effect of BBC radio counter- propaganda (Radio Londra) on the intensity of internal resistance to the Nazi-fascist regime. Using variation in monthly sunspot activities affecting the sky-wave propagation of BBC broadcasting towards Italy, we show that BBC radio had a strong impact on political violence. We provide further evidence to prove that BBC radio played an important role in coordinating resistance activities, but had no lasting role in motivating the population against the fascist regime. Keywords: Media, BBC, Counter-propaganda, Insurgency, Violence, WWII, Sunspots. JEL Classification: D74, L82, N44. ∗We thank Mirko Draca, Marco Manacorda, Paolo Morandotti, Tommaso Nannicini, Maria Petrova, Giulio Seccia, Andrea Tesei, Joachim Voth and seminar participants at the Catholic University of Milan, Tor Vergata University, Universit`aPolitecnica delle Marche, University of Exeter, 15th Media Economics Workshop, 1st Political Economy of Development Conference, 2nd Economics of Media Bias Workshop, 2nd Marco Fanno Alumni Workshop, Petralia Sottana Workshop 2017, and ICEEE 2017 for many helpful suggestions. We also thank Fabrizio Mur`eand Fabio Principe for the development of the RadioPropagAnDA software, and Filippo Sinagra for his precious insights on cryptography during the Resistance. We are grateful to Ben Olken for providing the software necessary for ITM calculation, Ruben Enikolopov for his help with the ITM software and Martin Watkins for sharing his data on BBC transmitters. Riccardo Bianchi Vimercati, Igor Cerasa, Viola Corradini and Nicola Fontana provided an outstanding research assistance. We acknowledge the financial support of the European Research Council (Consolidator Grant No. 648833). yDepartment of Economics and Finance and CEIS, University of Rome Tor Vergata; EIEF; IZA; Dondena. zDepartment of Economics and Finance, Universit`aCattolica del Sacro Cuore. xDepartment of Economics and Finance, LUISS \G. Carli"; CESifo. {Department of Economics and IGIER, Bocconi University; CIFAR; CEPR; CESIfo. 1 1 Introduction This paper studies the effects of the media during civil wars and foreign military occupations, when mobilizing and coordinating insurgency (or preventing this from happening) is a primary concern. Media can indeed play a critical role in providing information, conveying propaganda or spreading emotions. We study these issues in the context of the Nazi occupation of Italy between 1943 and 1945 and of the related civil war between fascist and partisan forces that claimed about 75,000 Italian casualties. Partisan resistance played an important role in the Italian liberation and was violently opposed by the Nazi-fascist forces. We study the effects of the BBC counter- propaganda (Radio Londra) on the intensity of the resistance movement. The BBC was deeply engaged in encouraging opposition to the German occupation throughout Europe. Its strategy was to target individuals and organizations that were already inclined towards an active resistance, besides providing information and counter-propaganda for the masses. Specifically, the BBC provided accurate and reliable information on military campaigns and on resistance activities. It also diffused counter-propaganda messages against the fascist regime. Finally, it conveyed encrypted messages to the partisan brigades, in order to direct and coordinate them. We propose a novel identification strategy that exploits exogenous time and geographic variation in the BBC signal strength across Italian municipalities, induced by sunspot ac- tivities. Unlike other local radios, BBC radio broadcasted from the UK and relied on the ionospheric propagation of high-frequency waves (short-waves and medium-waves). Time variation in signal strength within municipalities is induced exclusively by seasonal changes in daylight time, and by monthly variation in sunspot activities. Different geographic areas in Italy were differently affected, depending on the location of BBC transmitters, which did not change throughout this period. Using the Voice of America Coverage Analysis Program (VOACAP), we can simulate the strength of BBC signal across Italian municipalities for each 2 month. We then study the effects of these predicted monthly changes in BBC signal strength on indicators of insurgency against Nazi-fascist occupation in different Italian municipalities. As historical records do not provide a direct (time-varying) measure on the intensity of re- sistance, we use as an indirect proxy the number of episodes of violence perpetrated by the Nazi-fascists in response to partisan or civilian resistance (e.g., Nazi-fascists retaliations), as provided by the Atlas of Nazi-Fascist Massacres.1 Our main result is that BBC signal strength is positively associated with the intensity of resistance. A 10% increase in signal strength (corresponding to almost one standard deviation) increases the number of episodes of Nazi-fascist violence related to partisan and civilian resistance by more than 2.5 times, relative to the monthly average. This is a large effect, which is possibly explained by the role of BBC messages. As we discuss in Section2, the Italian BBC program provided counter-propaganda targeted to the Italian population overall, but it also conveyed information and encrypted messages to resistance fighters. For instance, Radio Londra was used by the Allies to deliver encrypted messages about the timing and locations of air-drops, of the allied air forces bombing, or about the ground movements of the Nazi-fascist and allied troops. A change in the BBC signal quality could determine whether or not partisan brigades would receive such key information, and therefore be able to undertake their resistance activities. Additional evidences reinforce the assumption that BBC broadcasting affected the inten- sity of partisan activities mainly through improved coordination. First, the effect on the intensity of resistance is simultaneous to the change in signal strength, and does not depend on the quality of previous transmissions. The lack of a long lasting effect suggests that the main mechanism worked through the coordination of allied
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