11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Sebastian Popa
Discussant/s:
Sebastian Popa
Meeting Room C

Matteo C. M. Casiraghi, Eugenio Cusumano
Visual Europeanization? European Union Membership and Political Party Logos

Tao Li, Zhenyu Wang, Rodrigo Praino
The Power of Political Portraits: Evidence from a Chinese Survey Experiment

Nerea Gándara Guerra, Sergi Martínez, Ana Ruipérez Núñez
De-Commemoration Policies and the Formation of Public Opinion
De-Commemoration Policies and the Formation of Public Opinion
Nerea Gándara Guerra, Sergi Martínez, Ana Ruipérez Núñez
European University Institute

Monuments and symbols are often employed to legitimize political systems. Consequently, authoritarian symbology is a frequent target after democratic transitions, whose removal represents a break with a past that is not anymore deemed as acceptable. How do these de-commemoration policies affect public opinion? We take advantage of the Spanish Historical Memory Law 52/2007 to assess the effects of removing authoritarian symbology from public spaces due to policy prescription on the process of political socialization. Our particular case exploits the de-commemoration of the main pre-democratic symbol during Franco dictatorship—fascist Spain’s coat of arms—from an urban public high school. To do so, we will survey its approx. Three-hundred students aged over fifteen before and after the public works end. We will estimate the effect of the de-commemoration using a Difference-in-Differences setup by replicating the same fieldwork in two public high schools located in the same city. We further explore the mechanisms by observing whether consequences come from the de-commemoration itself or by informing subjects that this process is executed according to the Spanish Historical Memory law—policy prescription. We do so by incorporating a survey experiment in the second wave. This paper deepens to our understanding of the socialization dynamics in post-authoritarian democracies and provides empirical evidence to the debate of the consequences of de-commemoration policies.