Media Persuasion and Historical Memory (Survey 2), 2023.

Balcells, Laia and Tellez, Juan F and Villamil, Francisco (2024). Media Persuasion and Historical Memory (Survey 2), 2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857234

The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions.

The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv) detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.

Data description (abstract)

A growing body of work shows that the choices countries make about how to publicly commemorate difficult historical periods has substantial downstream consequences for those country's political and social life. Yet these choices are often controversial and can foment polarisation that undermines transitional justice efforts. This study examines the causes of polarisation over controversies related to historical memory, using Spain as a case study. We focus on the role of the media, and distinguish between top-down and bottom-up theories of polarisation. The top-down account posits that the media polarises through its agenda-setting power to amplify local controversies. The bottom-up view suggests the public has strong prior intuitions about historical memory rooted in group identities.

Through two survey experiments exposing over 15,000 Spaniards to partisan media on historical memory versus other issues, the findings suggest a combination of bottom-up and top-down explanations. Baseline polarisation is higher over historical memory, suggesting deeply held views on the past. Partisans also appear resistant to persuasion on matters of historical memory, which further supports a bottom-up account. However, we find no evidence that attitudes are uniquely resistant to persuasion on matters of historical memory. The results suggest moving beyond dichotomous theories to explore how elite messaging interacts with public intuitions in polarising societies over the past.

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