Enver Hoxha’s Grand Experiment on the Greeks of Albania: The Effects of Communist-era Ethnic Engineering on Ethnopolitical Identity Compliance During and After Dictatorship

PI: Mary Shiraef, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Notre Dame

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,500, William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies

Project Abstract: Did communist-era policies toward minority groups decisively engineer contemporary identity landscapes? This paper examines personal and political identity production processes sparked by Soviet-era ethnic identity engineering. Stalinist border-making departed sharply from the “melting pot” model of the Western world by recognizing minority groups within regimes’ borders. These policies allowed for and even resourced minority identities, but also disregarded or repressed them in territories deemed for the majority ethnic group. The recognition policies provide a control comparison for this study’s goal to learn the long-term impacts of coerced assimilation in Soviet contexts. I hypothesize that ethnic engineering effectively resulted in transmission trends of minority groups away from their ancestral identities in both the communist-era public record and in private-public gravestones in the post-communist period––albeit to a far lesser extent. In terms of long-term back-lash of the policy, I posit that those who complied publicly with the ethnic designation of the regime––but not in the long-term––were also more likely in the post-communist period to carry anti-socialist political attitudes than those recognized as in the minority. I test these hypotheses at the southern border of Albania with Greece, where the communist leader’s recognition of minority groups was long enough in duration and applied strictly enough to expect divergence in the resulting populations’ identities. I draw my analysis from a differences-in-differences design applied on a hand-coded dataset from Albania’s internal communist records and from cemeteries throughout Albania’s districts neighboring the Albania-Greece border, paired against pre-communist data for the same districts. 

Muslim Family Law Index Website/Visualization Project

PI: Yüksel Sezgin, Associate Professor, Syracuse University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $2,200 William A. Steiger Fund for Legislative Studies

Project Abstract: There are 53 countries (35 Muslim-, 18 non-Muslim-majority) in the world that formally integrate Muslim Family Laws (MFLs) into their national legal systems. much spatio-temporal variation in understanding and interpretation of women’s rights and human rights under religious laws across these nations. The Muslim Family Law Index (MFL-I) aims to capture this spatio-temporal diversity and measure human/women’s rights compliance and the rule of law-friendliness of shari‘a-inspired family law systems for the period of 1919-2016. The Centennial Center Grant will be used to build a website to share with scholars, policymakers, and general public the project findings and a large body of literature collected by the research team.

Fear of Falling Behind: How Global Status Concerns Affect Support for Domestic Policies

PI: Jonathan Schulman, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University

Grant Amount and Grant Fund: $1,250, Presidency Research Fund

Project Abstract: Politicians regularly seize on Americans’ anxiety over the United States falling behind its competitors or wealthy peers to bolster support for their candidacy or policy. Donald Trump campaigned heavily in 2016 on alarmist warnings of the United States losing its dominant status because of his predecessors’ trade and immigration policies. Joe Biden repeatedly discussed the United States falling behind China in quality of domestic infrastructure and research and development to build bipartisan support for a large-scale infrastructure bill. Can this rhetoric increase support for a leader or a policy from individuals who would otherwise be opposed? Are there any unintended consequences to framing policies as competitions for global status, such as encouraging more aggressive or uncooperative foreign policy preferences, heightened political cynicism or anxiety, or higher tolerance of anti-Asian racism? I designed a survey experiment to test the effects of framing investments in domestic infrastructure as an arena in which the United States is said to be falling behind a rival or competitor to evaluate how this rhetoric affects Americans’ budgetary preferences, general foreign policy preferences, tolerance of anti-Asian racism, and political cynicism and anxiety.