This is an Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI) data project.
The annotated article can be viewed on the ATI website.
Project Overview
Can past wartime experiences affect political behavior beyond those who lived through them? We argue that local experiences of armed resistance leave political legacies that “memory entrepreneurs” can translate into contemporary political action via a community-based process of intergenerational transmission consisting of three core activities – memorialization, localization, and mobilization. We empirically substantiate this argument in Italy, where an intense armed resistance movement against Nazi-Fascist forces took place in the 1940s. We combine statistical analysis of original data across Italian municipalities and within-case analysis of a purposively selected locality to show how the past impacts the present via the preservation and activation of collective memories. This study improves our understanding of the processes of long-term transmission, emphasizes armed resistance as a critical source of the long-term political legacies of war, and explores its political effects beyond electoral and party politics.
Data Generation
The qualitative component of this study was conducted in two stages. The first stage occurred in December 2021, before the statistical analysis, when fieldwork in Sant'Anna di Stazzema in the Toscana region, where the anti-fascist campaign originated. The primary aim at this stage was to validate our outcome measure. The second stage focused on tracing, within a carefully selected case, the empirical fingerprints of a community-based transmission process that we had theorized. This Data Overview and the annotation exercise cover this second stage.
To select our case, we first followed guidelines for case selection for process tracing. We identified a municipality that met two fundamental criteria: (1) it had active resistance bands during 1943–45, and (2) it collected a large number of signatures for the Anti-fascist Law in 2020–21. From the pool of municipalities that fulfilled these criteria, we selected one with contextual conditions, which we could identify before fieldwork, that facilitated the unfolding of our hypothesized process (Beach and Pedersen, 2018, 2019). Specifically, we sought a municipality (1) included on the “national memory map” (for instance, officially recognized by the Italian government for its role in the Resistance) and (2) with the presence of organizations typically involved in memory work in Italy, such as local chapters of the Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia (ANPI) and the Associazione Ricreativa Culturale Italiana (ARCI). Additionally, we excluded municipalities with characteristics that could hinder our proposed process (Beach and Pedersen, 2018, 2019). For example, during our initial fieldwork in Sant'Anna di Stazzema, campaign organizers mentioned relying on personal networks to gather signatures and directly engaging with local actors in Toscana, a strategy that differed from our theorized pathway. As a result, we excluded municipalities in Toscana from further consideration.
Second, we combined these criteria with case selection guidelines for nested analysis and multi-method research. Using the results from our regression analysis, we sought to identify a municipality that exemplified the cross-case association identified in our statistical analysis. We looked for an “on-the-line” case, which closely aligned with the regression curve estimated by our main model, minimizing residuals (Lieberman, 2005; Seawright and Gerring, 2008). To do this, we normalized the residuals from our negative binomial regression using Anscombe’s (1948) formula and limited our analysis to cases within the smallest decile of the residual distribution.
Once we selected our case, we conducted a detailed examination of a small, semi-rural town in the Emilia-Romagna region in April 2022. Our data collection methods included direct observation, semi-structured interviews with key informants, and the review of local and community-kept archives, encompassing both textual and audiovisual documents. For sampling respondents, we adhered to guidelines for interview research aimed at process tracing (Gonzalez-Ocantos and Masullo, 2024). We identified key actors involved in each component of our theorized process and invited them to participate in the study. We employed a two-track snowball sampling strategy to reach our respondents: the first track began at the City Hall, which connected us with past and present public officials involved in memory preservation in the municipality. Understanding that official narratives might differ from grassroots perspectives, the second track targeted grassroots actors, such as community leaders, active members of civil associations, and local residents. This second track began at a locally well know cultural center (ARCI) primarily involved in memory work in the municipality.
All interviews were conducted in person in the municipality, recorded, and transcribed verbatim, with follow-ups carried out via phone or email as needed. All participants gave their informed consent to participate in the study.
During our fieldwork, we realized that direct observation was a vital data source. We witnessed physical memorialization directly: monuments, street names, tombstones, and gardens dedicated to the memory of the Resistance. Since our visit coincided with Liberation Day, we were invited to participate in several commemorative initiatives organized by civic organizations and local administration (experiential memorialization). Participant observation thus became a central technique for data collection. We directly observed how the narratives shared during interviews were reflected in the physical space of the municipality. For instance, interviewees described a significant moment in the 1970s when, after intense debates, local actors decided to rename several streets in honor of the town's partisans. As we explored the territory, we noted that these renamed streets were not marginal and were well-distributed across urban and rural areas.
Our direct observations also allowed us to uncover elements not mentioned in the interviews, providing new material to probe further in subsequent conversations. For example, in front of the City Hall, we saw that one of the oldest monuments commemorating those who lost their lives during the Resistance struggle had been renovated in the 1990s with the involvement of the local school. This observation led us to learn about a broader educational project focused on reconstructing historical memory through student research. Learning about the active involvement of younger generations was critical for us to trace a process that was pass down generation. Similarly, the logos on various commemorative sites in town revealed a network of civic organizations working alongside the local administration to promote memory initiatives. This gave us a good indication of the actors we should interview and of the diversity and extent of the network of “memory entrepreneurs” active in the municipality.
Lastly, through our interactions with key informants, we gained access to locally preserved archives containing valuable materials documenting the town’s memory work. These records also served as crucial data sources, complementing and cross-validating the testimonial data gathered through interviews. Since these archival materials were produced contemporaneously with the memory initiatives, they were less susceptible to the biases and inaccuracies often associated with retrospective accounts. For example, one interviewee shared with us a small booklet published in 1995 reconstructing the research process conducted by school students – including a list (and a picture) of the students and teachers involved -- that led, among other things, to the renovation of the monument.
Logic of Annotation
Given the richness of these data sources, we reported many of these observations in our paper, citing them as Field Notes or detailed descriptions of our in-field experiences. The objective of this annotation exercise is to offer readers additional (visual) context and interpretation by linking descriptions and claims that hinge on direct observation included in the paper to images we captured during fieldwork. Whenever possible, we also included photographs of archival materials, such as DVDs or local publications, to substantiate our findings further and provide visual context. Following our IRB, we removed from these visual documents any information that may defeat the anonymization of the municipality where we conducted fieldwork. |
