Legacy of Violence: 1941 Pogroms and Support for Populist Radical Right in today’s Poland

How persistent can the legacies of past violence be? Focusing on Poland, this article adds to the existing accounts of the endurance of the impact of past inter-ethnic violence on present political attitudes and behavior by linking the 1941 pogroms with contemporary support for the populist radical right. It draws on rich historical and contemporary data at the town level to show that vote shares of Law and Justice party are substantially higher in localities in which pogroms occurred on the eve of the Holocaust compared to the ones in which such episodes of inter-ethnic violence did not outbreak. The Law and Justice’s discourse of distortion of the past, negating the existence of complicity of Poles in the violence against Jews, seems to resonate better with voters in places with history of such violence and it apparently is more relevant than the overtly anti-Semitic discourse of Confederation party, for which no significant effect of past violence is found.