In this “Conversation with Authors,” we spoke with APSR authors Vasiliki (Vicky) Fouka and Hans-Joachim Voth about their open access article “Collective Remembrance and Private Choice: German-Greek Conflict and Behavior in Times of Crisis.”

APSR: We’d like to ask about the origins of this project. Where did the inspiration come from for the paper?

Vicky Fouka: This is our first collaboration, and it’s actually the first paper I ever wrote. We started working on this when Joachim was my adviser at Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. I guess the inspiration for this was Joachim’s work on persistence. This generated a lot of other work in both economics and political science on the persistence of cultural traits, or the persistent effects of the past on the present.

Studies of persistence and historical influence on the present were a growing literature at the time we started this project, with many papers demonstrating that the past matters. There was very little work that looked at change, though, or under which conditions this persistence exists. We recognized this gap in the literature, what hadn’t been demonstrated before, and I think our inspiration came from there. We know persistent effects from the past exist, but they arise under certain conditions, which is the main takeaway from the paper.

Hans-Joachim Voth: If I had to tell you why we wrote this paper, I would say it’s inspired simply by the events of the Greek debt crisis in the late 2000s- early 2010s. The striking thing there was, first of all, how much historical memory seemed to matter in that context. Suddenly, after what was, at least for the Germans, a period of relatively successful re-application to the human race, there we were in Nazi uniform on the cover of every other Greek magazine. This came a little bit as a shock! This makes one think “Under what conditions does the past suddenly come back?”

As Vicky explained, a growing body of work demonstrates that there are surprisingly deep historical roots in the things that we see around us. But the question, then, is this: Are historical roots always present, or does it sometimes vary and how might that variation relate to human memory? We don’t constantly remember every single thing we ever did – that would be completely inefficient, right? We know from psychology that memory is associative. People remember certain things if they are useful, and it’s useful if something today reminds you of something from the past.

The interesting thing is to do that at the collective level. Almost nobody in Greece in the late 2000s had personal memories of German occupation 80 years earlier. But things are collectively remembered, even if no one has personal memories. We were looking at this phenomenon, and it seemed like an interesting, ambitious thing to pursue. We ended up writing this paper for 10 years.

Vicky Fouka: It’s also interesting that Joachim is German and I am Greek, so we also had lots of inside scoop and anecdotes just from reading the press in our respective countries.

APSR: What part of this process was the most difficult for either of you?

Vicky Fouka: Well, those 10 years were kind of a long time!

Hans-Joachim Voth: Yes, this one certainly took much longer than we would have imagined at the beginning. We were convinced we were on to something important. It took a while, I think, for the profession to catch up. In some ways we would have had an easier time now, because we’re seeing an outpouring of work that is sort of related to our theory and the subject matter here.

Vicky Fouka: We started writing this paper in 2012, the first draft was out in 2013, and it’s just now been published ten years later. In the meantime, there have been several papers built on a very similar idea of time-varying persistence, and the past mattering only under certain conditions. On the one hand, I’d say it was kind of challenging to have to wait so long to publish our piece, but on the other hand, it was great to see that it was also generative of a literature that essentially builds on the idea.

APSR: Would you say the ten-year process was the biggest challenge because there wasn’t as much interest in this topic of collective memory until the past 5 years or so?

Hans-Joachim Voth: I think it’s a combination of things. I think the application to a hard-core economic issue such as car purchases, in retrospect, was probably not ideal for the prospects of the paper. We could have probably published earlier if we’d stuck with a cultural or political dependent variable on the left-hand side. Trying to convince I/O economists that cultural variables affect big purchase decisions was difficult. In some ways I think we were just too innovative because there’s just some ideas and approaches that are hard to publish. I say that as someone who edited economics journals for the better part of the last two decades. Despite this, we decided to go forward with the car purchases variable, and I think we ended up with something very nice and very complete in the end.

Vicky Fouka: In a way, the paper also did benefit from the lengthy writing and review process. It always takes too long to publish, but we often end up with additions that make the paper stronger. This is an example of that, as we added several new analyses. It resembled an out of sample test of the original hypothesis, because we started testing our theory with data up to the year when we first wrote the paper in 2012. Through consecutive revisions, we added additional data that confirmed the findings, a whole new analysis with political outcomes. So, our process was long, but in this case it made the paper stronger.

APSR: What was the most exciting or surprising element of this long research process?

Vicky Fouka: With every iteration we were asked to make additions, yet we still found confirmation of the original hypotheses and the patterns that we saw in the initial data. In response to our reviewers, we added an analysis of voting patterns and how they are affected by memories. Of course, our paper was initially just about consumer behavior, where the focus was on car purchases. The added analysis finds that the exact same effect is there with political behavior. It was exciting to see these patterns very clearly in both analyses. That made the paper stronger, and it made me more firmly believe that we’re on to something there.

Hans-Joachim Voth: Two things especially surprised me. One is the analysis we did through surveys. We looked at the ancestors of two groups we called movers and stayers. For example, if your parents or grandparents come from a location that suffered under German occupation, we can compare you with people who later moved into the same municipality. That’s a very powerful analysis, because it takes away many of the location specific variables that could be driving all sorts of behavior. Studying these two groups makes it clear that if members of your family are more likely to have personal memories of German atrocities, you’ll report strong responses. These surveys gave us granular, individual-level confirmation of the mechanism we had in mind.

APSR: In these interviews we like to ask authors to relate their work to current events. I wanted to ask about the relationship between collective memory and places of memory. Is there any reason to think that the prevalence of places of memory should be discouraged? Put differently, is there any tension between places of memory and current inter-group conflict that we should be wary of?

Vicky Fouka: The main takeaway of our paper is that places of memory matter. The clear recommendation coming from our work is not that we shouldn’t have them. We study one specific case in which commemoration focuses on past historical conflict. This history becomes salient in light of present conflict. However, it doesn’t always have to be like that. This, of course, can apply to many other cases, specifically in how we commemorate events. If commemoration is structured around challenging intergroup relations, then we may expect it to lead to persistent, negative inter-group relations.

At the same time, reminding people of the past can also make them more positive towards outgroups that share a similar traumatic experience. I have additional work showing commemoration can make commonalities across groups salient and improve intergroup relations. In my view, our work shows that commemoration matters. We should be careful about it, thinking about the content and what that transmits and preserves.

Hans-Joachim Voth: Commemoration is a tool, and it’s a tool that works. In some ways it’s a confidence trick, making people think that something is a memory when they have no personal memory of it. It’s a way to instill a shared narrative among people, and our research suggests that works very effectively.

Commemoration could be used for good or bad. For example, it can be used like the Serbs to justify atrocities because they were defeated in Kosovo. Or it can be used like habitual ceremonial reconciliation between Germany and France, where people go to these sites of memory like Verdun and the German chancellors and French presidents attend. Like all things that create some kind of emotional intoxication, commemoration should be used with care.

APSR: Is there anything else either of you want to say about this particular paper or related work?

Hans-Joachim Voth: I think the broader question and context continues to fascinate me. I think this is one of those big, important questions and I’d certainly be happy to revisit related issues. Given how powerful this is, I’m fascinated with memories that aren’t really based in fact. Something that I’ve recently started to think about is fake memory and its function. Something special about memory is that any kind of narrative will do, whether it’s founded in fact or not.

Vicky Fouka: Yes, that this is a big, important question, and there’s still a lot to learn. Memory is a bundle: how is it going to affect things? How will it interact with present conditions? Which components will be more salient?  This is still something we don’t really know that much about.

I’m quite interested in memory transmitted through schools and the content of school textbooks. This is something that we know matters a lot in the US today. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about, trying to break down the different components of memory. How exactly is something narrated? Which events are highlighted? In which context do they appear? I think that textbooks can give a lot of information on these questions.

– Vasiliki Fouka, Stanford University

– Hans-Joachim Voth, University of Zurich