Explaining Sassoun Descendants’ Electoral Support for ARF

David Gomtsyan from Higher School of Economics (Russia) talks about his academic paper with CivilNet host interviewer Aleksandr Grigoryan from American University of Armenia.

Dr. Gomtsyan and his co-author Eren Arbatli published a paper titled “Voting Retrospectively: Critical Junctures and Party Identification,“ in European Economic Review. The study provides evidence for retrospective voting in the very long-term by exploiting a unique quasi-natural experiment of history. The authors trace the origins of party identification to a critical juncture in the local history of Sassoun. Sassoun received vital support from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) both during the Great Massacres against Armenians at the end of the 19th century and during the Armenian Genocide (1915–1917). With the help of the ARF, some of the survivors from Sassoun were resettled in various villages in modern-day Armenia, mainly in the province of Aragatsotn. Although the party was not active in Armenia during seven decades of Soviet rule, the authors find that villages with Sassoun ancestry display substantially higher electoral support for the ARF than other villages.

The link to the paper.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292119301461?via%3Dihub