How commemorating victims of past atrocities can reduce support for revisionist political actors

EGAP researchers: Ruth Ditlmann

Other researchers: Oguzhan Turkoglu and Berenike Firestone

Key takeaway: Commemorating victims of past atrocities can reduce support for political parties engaging in historical revisionism that downplays those injustices. Looking at small commemorative markers honoring victims of the Nazi regime, the authors find that, on average, the installation of these memorials is associated with a nearly 1 percentage point decrease in the vote share for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in areas immediately surrounding the memorials between 2013 and 2021.

Geographical Region: Europe

Type of study: Observational

Preparer: Mark Williamson

April 9, 2024

Executive Summary

How do efforts to publicly commemorate the victims of past atrocities shape voters’ preferences for political actors that downplay or deny those atrocities? Despite a growing prevalence of memorials to victims of historical injustices around the world, there is little empirical evidence on this question. This study investigates the impact of one commemoration initiative, the installation of small public memorials in Berlin honoring victims of the Nazi regime, on support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Analyzing electoral results and memorial installation data between 2013 and 2021, the authors find that areas exposed to these memorials experienced a significant decrease in AfD vote share, demonstrating a negative association between local commemoration projects and support for parties advocating historical revisionism.

Policy Challenge

Recent years have seen debates about whether and how past atrocities should be commemorated in public spaces. Yet we have scarce evidence on how symbolic forms of commemoration—such as the installation of memorials honoring victims—shape related political attitudes and behaviors. Given that political actors, particularly those on the far-right, have engaged in rhetoric that misrepresents and minimizes past injustices, policymakers have a pressing interest in knowing whether efforts to commemorate victims are likely to bolster or reduce support for those advocating this kind of historical revisionism.

On the one hand, commemoration initiatives increase the visibility of past atrocities, potentially encouraging feelings of empathy towards victims and awareness of the true historical record. To the extent that these reactions are at odds with the rhetoric of political actors who deny the harms of past atrocities, commemoration may make voters more reluctant to support those actors. On the other hand, efforts to honor victims may generate “backlash,” with voters shifting their support to actors who deny the darkest chapters in their country’s history. In Spain, for example, the removal of street names linked to a former right-wing authoritarian regime led to an increase in support for a far-right party that defends the regime’s legacy (Villamil & Balcells 2021). Concerns about this kind of backlash are motivated by a large social psychology literature documenting the various defensive reactions that people tend to have when presented with reminders of wrongdoing committed by their in-group in the past.

Context

The authors evaluate these competing accounts in Berlin, Germany, between 2013 and 2021. As in several other European cities during this period, local commemorative memorials known as “Stolpersteine” were gradually installed across the city to honor Jewish victims of the Nazi regime. These memorials are small brass pavement stones that provide biographical information about victims outside of their last freely chosen place of residence.

Like other populist far-right parties in Europe, Alternative for Germany (AfD) has engaged in historical revisionism around past atrocities, downplaying the Holocaust and the Nazi regime’s wrongdoing as a way to attract support from voters on the extreme right. The Stolpersteine work to increase the local visibility of the victims of Nazism, providing a direct contrast to this rhetoric.

Research Design

To investigate whether the placement of Stolperstein memorials are associated with changes in support for the revisionist AfD party, the authors create a panel of electoral results at the polling station level between 2013 and 2021. This data is then matched with the timing and locations of the Stolpersteine installations to identify whether and when voters in a given polling station became exposed to the commemoration initiative.

To estimate the association between the introduction of the victim memorials in an area and local voting behaviour, the authors use a two-way fixed effects model. This design accounts for time-invariant confounders within each polling station area, such as the number of Jews living in the area before 1945 or whether its voters traditionally lean more conservative versus liberal, as well as election-specific confounders, like citywide shifts in the AfD’s vote share from one election to the next.

Results

The main results reveal that local exposure to Stolperstein memorials is negatively associated with voting for the revisionist far-right party. The estimates show that the introduction of one or more Stolpersteine in an area is associated with an 0.96 percentage point decrease in vote share for the AfD. This result is substantively meaningful for a party whose average support is around 10%. The placement of additional Stolpersteine and Stolpersteine locations within a polling station area, as well as Stolpersteine in neighbouring areas, also correlate with further decreases in AfD support.

A natural question is whether some common factor—like concerns about fascism—explains which areas choose to install these memorials and which are less likely to vote for the AfD. If areas that receive Stolpersteine are already pre-disposed against the AfD, the observed impact of the memorial on vote shares could be spurious. The authors address these concerns in two ways. First, they describe how the placement of the memorials is largely unrelated to the local political climate. In fact, approximately 80% of people who commission Stolpersteine live outside of Berlin. Second, the authors note that the installation of Stolpersteine follows a timeline that is essentially unrelated to the timing of elections. Because of a lengthy process of commissioning and placing these memorials, whether an area receives a Stolperstein just before versus just after an election is essentially arbitrary. Leveraging this fact, the authors show that areas that are exposed to Stolpersteine a few months before an election record lower vote shares for the AfD than areas that were exposed a few months afterwards, providing causal evidence on the impact of the memorials.

Finally, the authors provide suggestive evidence on potential mechanisms. First, they show that the shift in AfD vote share is not accompanied by a change in voter turnout, indicating that the observed relationship is driven by changes in voting preferences, with many AfD votes moving to the center-right Christian Democrats (CDU). Second, a small survey of Berlin residents shows that Stolpersteine are associated with feelings of empathy and awareness of past atrocities, suggesting these memorials may lead some to reconsider their vote for the AfD based on an incongruence between these reactions and the AfD’s rhetoric around Nazi atrocities. A third possibility is that Stolpersteine act as signals of local social norms around respectful remembrance, which is consistent with the authors’ findings that Stolperstein placement is not associated with backlash at the local level.

Lessons

This study provides encouraging evidence on the potential for commemorative initiatives honoring the victims of past injustices to reduce support for political actors who push revisionist rhetoric downplaying those injustices. This specific case shows that even relatively discrete, inexpensive memorials can shift political preferences away from the denial of uncomfortable histories in substantively meaningful ways. Therefore, in addition to the intrinsic value they represent by honoring the victims, memorials can also shape the politics of the present. The findings are likely generalizable to other settings—like Berlin—where the population largely accepts the facts of the relevant atrocities, but the potential for backlash is more likely in cases where the history of those atrocities is politicized or broadly denied.