Assistant Professor
Department of Social Sciences
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
francisco.villamil@uc3m.es
Despite the importance of authoritarian and nationalist values in military culture, we know little about the link between the military and the far right. In this article we argue that there is an ideological affinity between the military and far-right parties, strengthened by occupational socialization. Moreover, the presence of military institutions also helps mobilizing far-right support among the surrounding population. We test this argument using data from Spain. We show both that military personnel are substantially more likely than civilians to support the far right and that the location of military facilities in Spain is linked to higher far-right support. We also discuss the generalizability of the results and provide tentative evidence that a similar link is likely to be observed in countries where the armed forces have been historically focused on controlling internal dissent and where national sovereignty has been threatened, by either internal or external challengers.
Wars can produce drastic changes in the attitudes and behavior of the citizens of the countries involved in the fighting. Yet such conflicts also have important security and economic implications for uninvolved, ‘third-party‘ states. How do the wars of others shape domestic public attitudes? We explore this question by analyzing the effect of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine on Spanish nationalism. Exploiting a natural experiment in Spain, we show that the Russian invasion caused a general increase in the salience of Spanish national identification, but not at the expense of regional or substate national identities. We also find an activation effect on electoral participation and increased support for taxation. Our study illuminates pathways through which international conflicts can impact domestic politics in third-party states.
Previous research shows that violence is an important factor driving ethnic identification and grievances, but most works that explore micro-level effects focus on specific cases and have limited external validity. This article looks at the individual-level consequences of civilian victimization in a large sample across Africa. Combining georeferenced survey data from several rounds of the Afrobarometer, victimization events from the UCDP-GED, and data on collective targeting from the ethnic one-sided violence dataset, it studies the effect of exposure to violence on ethnic identification and self-reported ethnic grievances. Results show that violence increases ethnic identification and ethnic grievances particularly when it is committed by state forces and among individuals who belong to an ethnic group that was collectively targeted in the past.
Wartime civilian victimization produces a counter-reaction against the perpetrator. However, this effect hinges on the creation of collective memories of wartime events. In many countries, former fighting actors and political elites try to redirect memories of wartime events through denial, propaganda, and co-optation. Previous works have ignored these aspects. I argue that the effect of violence is conditional on the capacity of local communities to build collective memories and bypass those efforts. I test this argument using local-level data from Guatemala. Results show that the effects of state violence on postwar voting depend on prewar exposure to political mobilization.
Memories of old conflicts often shape domestic politics long after these conflicts end. Contemporary debates about past civil wars and/or repressive regimes in different parts of the world suggest that these are sensitive topics that might increase political polarization, particularly when transitional justice policies are implemented and political parties mobilize discontentment with such policies. One such policy recently debated in Spain is removing public symbols linked to a past civil war and subsequent authoritarian regime (i.e., Francoism). However, the empirical evidence on its impact is still limited. This article attempts to fill this gap by examining the political consequences of street renaming. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that the removal of Francoist street names has contributed to an increase of electoral support for a new far-right party, Vox, mainly at the expense of a traditional right-wing conservative party, PP. Our results suggest that revisiting the past can cause a backlash among those ideologically aligned with the perpetrator, and that some political parties can capitalize on this.
Recent research has focused on the legacies of civil war violence on political preferences, finding that wartime victimization decreases support for the perpetrator or its political identity in the long run. However, we know little about the conditions under which this effect takes place. Historical accounts from civil wars suggest that the longterm effect of violence is not homogenous, nor consistent across areas within a single conflict. Addressing this gap, this article explores the effects of wartime victimization on long-term political preferences at the local level, looking at the conditioning effect of the local social context. In particular, I argue that the effect of wartime violence depends on the existence of local networks that create and maintain memories of the violence, and capitalize on them for future mobilization. This argument is tested in the context of the Spanish Civil War. I build a novel dataset using archival data, historical secondary sources, and already existing datasets, covering 2,100 municipalities across Spain. In line with the argument, it is found that Francoist wartime victimization during the civil war is linked to an increase in leftist vote share after democracy was restored four decades later, but mainly in those municipalities where clandestine, left-leaning political networks were active after the conflict.
States often engage in internal purges to eliminate political dissidents within their own ranks. However, partly because of the absence of reliable data, we know little about the logic and dynamics of these purges, particularly of lower-rank members of the state. Why do state authorities persecute these individuals when they do not entail a clear threat to the regime? We focus on the purges of public-school teachers during the early years of Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain. Using detailed historical sources, we explore whether teachers were more likely to be purged following the two main cleavages in 1930s Spain: the left-right divide and the center-periphery (i.e. nationalist) cleavage. Our results suggest that whilst the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was still unfolding Francoist authorities targeted teachers from leftist localities, thus focusing on potential security threats behind the frontlines. After winning the war, Francoists switched their targeting to teachers from national minority groups in order to promote nation-building policies leading to their assimilation. Our findings highlight the double logic of purging as both a preemptive measure against internal threats and a nation-building tool.
While many studies provide insights into the causes of wartime civilian victimization, we know little about how the targeting of particular segments of the civilian population affects the onset and escalation of armed conflict. Previous research on conflict onset has been largely limited to structural variables, both theoretically and empirically. Moving beyond these static approaches, this paper assesses how the state-led targeting of specific ethnic groups affects the likelihood of ethnic conflict onset, and the evolution of conflicts once they break out. Relying on a new dataset with global coverage that captures the ethnic identity of civilian victims of targeted violence, we find evidence that the state-led civilian victimization of particular ethnic groups increases the likelihood that the latter become involved in ethnic civil war. We also find tentative, yet more nuanced, evidence that ethnic targeting by state forces affects the escalation of ongoing conflicts.
Villamil, Francisco (2023) Civil Wars. In: Encyclopedia of Political Sociology, eds. Maria T. Grasso and Marco Giugni. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 56-58.
Rama, José, Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte and Francisco Villamil (2022) Descomponiendo a la derecha radical europea: el perfil de sus votantes. In: En los márgenes de la democracia liberal: Populismo, nacionalismo y radicalismo ideológico en Europa, eds. Ángel Valencia and Belén Fernández-García. Granada: Comares, 239-258.