How Spain's Civil War Shifted Loyalties From Left Parties to Regionalism

Why This Question Matters

The dominant view on the long-term effects of political violence holds that the original cleavage that sparked conflict—victim versus perpetrator, left versus right—gets passed down across generations as enduring ingroup-outgroup animosity. Joan Barcelo and Leonid Peisakhin argue this model misses an important possibility: when a conflict is multidimensional, a cleavage that was secondary before the fighting can become the primary marker of political identity afterward.

Case: Two Cleavages in the Spanish Civil War

The paper studies the Spanish Civil War, where a Left–Right ideological division coexisted with a center–periphery (regional autonomy) divide. These overlapping cleavages make Spain a useful case to test whether post-conflict politics can reorder political identities and loyalties.

How the Authors Study It

• The analysis leverages plausibly exogenous variation in wartime violence across localities—a natural experiment of history—to identify causal effects.
• The authors combine panel data on voting over time with original survey data measuring contemporary political attitudes to track how local exposure to violence shaped long-run preferences.
• Complementary tests probe mechanisms, focusing on shifts in political discourse and issue salience after the war.

Key Findings

• Contrary to the expectation that wartime victim–perpetrator alignments simply deepen Left–Right divisions, communities that experienced more violence at the hands of Rightist forces became more likely, over time, to support regional autonomy rather than turn toward Leftist parties.
• The results are consistent with a story in which post-conflict political discourse and mobilization elevated the center–periphery cleavage, allowing a previously secondary identity to dominate local politics.

What This Suggests for Political Science and Policy

These findings show that the political legacy of conflict is not fixed by the original axis of violence: post-conflict actors and rhetoric can reshape collective memory and realign political loyalties around different cleavages. For scholars, this highlights the importance of considering multidimensional cleavages and the role of post-war political entrepreneurs in studies of political violence, identity, and democratization. For practitioners, it underscores that reconciliation and institutional design after conflict can influence which identities and grievances persist.