All in the Family? Socialization and the Legacies of State Violence

Elizabeth Nugent
Assistant Professor of Politics
Princeton University

Scholars interested in the legacies of state violence have overwhelmingly focused on families as the unit of analysis. In part, the focus on families is driven by methodology rather than theory, because "random assignment" to families at birth is a valuable framework for causal inference. However, people exist within multiple social groups, and early socialization literature identified that not only family but also friends and community members socialize individuals into politics. In this talk, Nugent explores the comparative effects of the repression of family, friends and community on subsequent political behavior, citing the original nationally representative survey of 1,200 adult Tunisians combined with 175 sibling pairs of the primary respondents that she and her co-authors conducted. 

Presented by Kellogg's Democratization Research Cluster.

Elizabeth Nugent is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University, where she studies the politics and political psychology of authoritarianism and religion in the Middle East. She is the author of After Repression: How Polarization Derails Democratic Transition (Princeton University Press, 2020) and holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University.