We study the political legacy of the Finnish Civil War of 1918 over one hundred years. Despite the seemingly fast recovery after the Civil War of 1918, the wounds of the conflict are still present in subtle ways in Finnish society. In a survey conducted by the Finnish public broadcasting company YLE, 68% of respondents said the conflict still divides Finns at least to some extent. But where do these dividing lines show up and how? Do municipalities that were more exposed to the civil war vote differently from those that were less exposed? Or do individuals with a family history of the civil war hold different political views?

To answer questions such as these, we combine historical and contemporary data sets with modern micro-econometric methods. The primary purpose of our paper is to leverage within-country variation in exposure to the civil war to study (i) what were the immediate political impacts of the Finnish Civil War, and (ii) how the relationship between civil war exposure and voting behavior evolved over time. We also use survey data on modern-day political elites to examine how the civil war influences ideology today.