Research Seminar on Diversity and Development Cemal Eren Arbatli "Partisanship as Tradition: Critical Junctures, Collective Memory and Persistent Party Identification"

HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID) and NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions are pleased to announce their next joint Research Seminar on Diversity and Development.The event is held jointly with the seminar “Political Economy”.

Cemal Eren Arbatli, Assistant Professor and Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Economics at the NRU HSE, will present his paper "Partisanship as Tradition: Critical Junctures, Collective Memory and Persistent Party Identification" (co-authored by David Gomtsyan).

The seminar will take place in the HSE building at 26-4 Shabolovka str., room 4409, at 5.00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 13, 2018.

Working language of the seminar is English.

We would like to ask everyone who requires an HSE pass to send an e-mail to Oksana Antsiferova oantsiferova(at)hse.ru (stating your name, surname, your affiliation and contact e-mail address) until 10 a.m., November 13.

Abstract: Party loyalty can be motivated by various forces. Sometimes it is driven by instrumental motives and ideological leanings. At other times, it is better viewed as an expression of more enduring social and cultural identities transmitted across generations. We study the case of Sasun Armenians to illustrate this latter view. Our paper traces the origins of long-term party identi cation to a critical juncture in the local history of Sasun, a mountainous region of the Ottoman Empire located in Eastern Turkey. During the Great Massacres against Armenians at the end of the 19th century, Armenian residents of Sasun received armed support from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) to defend their villages from military attacks. With the help of the ARF rebels, survivors of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) from Sasun region settled in various villages in modern-day Armenia. We show that the descendants of Sasun migrants strongly embrace the local legacy of their ancestral contact with the ARF. They are not only more likely to name their children after the ARF rebels who helped Sasun people in their armed struggle but they also are more likely to vote for the ARF today, although the party was not active in Armenia during the seven decades of the Soviet rule.