Names and behavior in a war

Abstract

We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence—using name choices corresponding to a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in ex-Yugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war.

Appendix

1.1 Name classification

Ethnic names

There are 374 distinct first male names on the Catholic (Croatian) calendar and 275 distinct first male names on the Orthodox (Serbian) name calendar. The same Christian saints correspond to different versions of the same name on the two calendars, as in Ivan (Croat version) vs. Jovan (Serbian version) or Stjepan vs. Stefan/Stepan. Thirty-five names appear on both calendars and we do not code these as distinctly national. With one exception (Marko), all of the top-10 (most frequent) Croatian male names according to the 2001 census (a set which includes Ante) appear on the Catholic calendar.

Eighty-one percent of Croatian army veterans have names that appear on the Catholic and/or Orthodox calendars. 33,259 of these veterans (7% of all veterans) have names that appear on both calendars and thus cannot be classified as having either Croatian or Serbian nationality. In sum, 74% (354,773) of Croatian army veterans have a name that appears only on the Catholic name calendar and only 0.4% have Orthodox calendar (Serbian) first names. For completeness, we have also inspected all of the distinct male first names appearing in the veterans register and identified a subset of 885 names as Muslim. (The most frequent Muslim names are Samir, Mirsad, Senad, Safet, Muhamed, Ervin, Ismet, Ibrahim, Omer, and Amir.) Under 2% of veterans have Muslim names. The remaining veterans, i.e., those we do not classify as Croat, Serb, or Muslim, typically have non-Yugoslav names (primarily Italian and English) or have names that appear on both calendars.

Nationalist names

The “Other nationalist name” indicator corresponds to the first names of the 22 politicians and generals who received the WWII Knighthood of the Independent State of Croatia: Salko Alikadić, Eduard Bunić, Jure Francetić, Franjo Šimić, Ladislav Aleman, Vilko Begić, Rafael Boban, Matija Čanić, Fedor Dragojlov, Milan Desović, Duro Grujić, Artur Gustović, Slavko Kvaternik, Vladimir Laxa, Vjekoslav Luburić, Franjo Lukać, Josip Metzger, Ivan Perčević, Krunoslav Perčić, Dragutin Rubčić, Adolf Sabljak, and Slavko Štancer. Further, we include in the indicator a set of 4 additional names of the Ustaše leaders who were chiefly responsible for the Holocaust in Croatia: The Jewish question ideologists Andrija Artuković and Mile Budak, and the following (non-knighted) notorious commanders of concentration camps: Miroslav Filipović and Dinko Šakić.

All of the nationalist names appear on the Catholic calendar; Ivan and Josip are also in the top-10 list of Croatian names based on the 2001 census. Josip Metzger, from the knighted list, was a general and chief organizer of a concentration camp. Ivan Perčević was one of the leaders of the movement; when Ante Pavelić visited Adolf Hitler, Perčević was among the small party of Ustaše leaders to accompany him. Both were executed after WWII. However, both Ivan and Josip have also strong anti-fascist connotations: The leader of the Partisan resistance movement and of post-WWII Yugoslavia was Josip Broz Tito. There are also well-known Partisan leaders called Ivan (e.g., Ivan Rukavina). It is difficult to define a separate Partisan name indicator since a large fraction of Partisan leaders were Serbs. Instead, we provide direct comparisons between the effects of Ante and both Josip and Ivan in Section 4. In Appendix Fig. 7, we also contrast the evolution of popularity of all male top-10 names according to the 2001 census. Only the 3 top-10 names we refer to as nationalist (Ante, Ivan, and Josip) peak both during WWII and during the 1991–1995 war.

Name-type comparisons

In Section 4, we compare the 1991–1995 war behavior of men with nationalist names with that of men with Croatian (Catholic calendar) names. The analysis, which covers a relatively short time period, is not sensitive to including all names and controlling for Muslim and Serbian name indicators.

In Section 5, we track name patterns for newborns across seven decades, which raises two issues. First, in “siege settlements,” most of which were under Serbian rule for much of the 1991–1995 war, the share of Serbian and Muslim names given to newborns is twice higher during the five years preceding the war and four times higher during the first five years after the war when compared with the share during the five years of the war. This clearly partly corresponds to the changing ethnic composition of these locations. Hence, for the purpose of comparing Croatian nationalist-name popularity across locations, we omit from the analysis in Section 5 all newborns with Serbian and Muslim names. Second, across Croatia and also within all three types of locations we consider in Section 5, the share of (non-Serbian non-Muslim) names that correspond to the Catholic (Croatian) calendar is declining after 1970. This is related to the increasing popularity of international (English, Italian) names that do not appear on the traditional Catholic calendar. We inspected this trend across the sets of locations and found it to be highly similar both in size and the time pattern. Since our primary goal is to compare time trends across locations differently affected by war experiences, and since choosing a name for a newborn boy outside of the Croatian calendar corresponds to not using a nationalist name, the analysis presented in Section 5 is based on using all name types (other than Serbian and Muslim) to calculate the shares of nationalist names on each cohort and birthplace type. After excluding the set of newborns with Muslim and Serbian first names, the main features of Fig. 3, which plots the Croatia-wide evolution of the share of nationalist names, are not materially affected.

Finally, in Section 6 we analyze the name choices for boys born during 1991–1995. The fathers of these boys can be expected to have been born before the rapid decline in the use of Catholic names in Croatia; hence, in Section 6 we constrain the set of fathers’ names (but not sons’ names) to those that appear on the Catholic calendar (mirroring the approach used in Section 4, where we studied men who were adults in 1991).

1.2 Tables and figures

Table 5 Predicting volunteering and KIA across subsets of places of birth

Table 6 Predicting child name choices by injured veterans of the War of Independence

Fig. 7

Cohort shares of top-10 Croatian names

Fig. 8

WWII concentration camp areas

Fig. 9

High-KIA areas

Fig. 10

Siege areas