HAS THE TIME COME? THREE ESSAYS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY AND POLITICIZATION IN THE IMMEDIATE, SHORT, AND LONG RUN

Abstract

Taking the form of startling populist victories, massive waves of protest, or politico-sanitary COVID crises, historical events have returned to the forefront of politics in many places around the world. In this backdrop, this dissertation examines how historical events affect levels of politicization over time time. Previous research is focused primarily on verifying event effects on political attitudes, but provides few insights into how different these effects might be across different events, people, or time horizons, or how they might influence foundational political attributes. This dissertation attempts to move the literature towards these issues by conducting three pieces of research related to these questions. The first of these essays, “Can Historical Events Generate Persistent Cohort Effects in Politicization?” examines how events affect politicization levels in the long run. It uses thirty years of data on political talk to evaluate if twentieth-century events from five Western European countries are associated with cohort-level differences in the frequency with which people talk about politics. Results reveal wide heterogeneities in the performance of events as predictors of this behavior, and associations between robustness of influence and an event’s capacity to generate lasting reconfigurations of state action, on one hand, and between direction of influence and the divisive or unifying nature of an event, on the other. The second essay, “Can Historical Events Alter Social Gaps in Politicization?” analyzes how social disparities in political talk changed in West Germany before and during German Reunification, and how these changes compared to equivalent variations for France over the same periods. Results suggest that events increase socioeconomic disparities in political talk for the population at-large while decreasing them for young adults. The third essay, “Taking the Victory of Jair Bolsonaro Personally,” shows the results of an ethnographic fieldwork in São Paulo that investigated the immediate everyday political effects provoked by the victory of Jair Bolsonaro. It describes how this victory generated a political environment of “engagement without action,” and suggests that events produce immediate politicization bursts by infiltrating political stories into domains of social experience that are more frequently applied than politics as frames of social experience.