martin-kosiik/Geopolitics-of-Repressions

My bachelor thesis project

The Geopolitics of Repressions

This repository contains code for my bachelor thesis project titled The Geopolitics of Repressions. The final version of the manuscript is available here.

Instructions for Replication

To succesfully replicate the analysis, follow the steps below:

1. Downolad the repository by clicking on Clone or download under the repository name.
2. Create a folder named memo_list on the same level as the folders LaTex, code, etc.
3. Download the Memorial data from here and unzip the content into memo_list.
4. Download the Zhukov and Talibova (2018) dataset from here and copy file eventsClean_v1.RData into data folder of your cloned Geopolitics-of-Repressions repository.
5. Open R project file Geopolitics-of-Repressions.Rproj and run the RMarkdown scripts in code folder starting with 01_ethnicity_imputation_and_data_summary.Rmd and ending with 11_effect_size_calculations.Rmd.
6. Additionally, if you want to reproduce the manuscript itself, set the file Bachelor_or_Master_thesis.tex as the main file and run pdfLaTeX compiler.

If you have any troubles with replication or any other questions, email me at martin.kosiik@gmail.com.

Rendered R Markdown files

The following files are rendered R Markdown documents that show the R code that produced all tables, figures, and other analysis in the thesis:

• 01_ethnicity_imputation_and_data_summary.md | R Markdown source
• 02_imputing_date_of_arrest.md | R Markdown source
• 03_border_frontiers.md | R Markdown source
• 04_create_main_datasets.md | R Markdown source
• 05_main_dataset_summary.md | R Markdown source
• 06_diff_in_diff_reg_results.md | R Markdown source
• 07_diff_in_diff_reg_tables.md | R Markdown source
• 08_diff_in_diff_robustness_checks.md | R Markdown source
• 09_synthetic_control_method.md | R Markdown source
• 10_heterogeneity_by_border.md | R Markdown source
• 11_effect_size_calculations.md | R Markdown source
• Functions used throughout the project

Abstract

This thesis studies how geopolitical concerns influence attitudes of a state toward its ethnic minorities. Using data digitized from archival sources on more than 2 million individual arrests by the Soviet secret police, I apply difference-in-differences and synthetic control method to estimate how changing German-Soviet relations influenced repressions of Germans in the Soviet Union. The results of both methods show that there was large and statistically significant increase in arrests of Germans following the German invasion into the Soviet Union in 1941. Furthermore, the impact of war appears to be highly persistent since there is almost no decline in the estimated effect on repressions for nearly 10 years after the end of the war.