Contagious Prejudice: The Marocchinate

Riccardo Ghidoni () and David Schindler ()
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Riccardo Ghidoni: University of Bologna
David Schindler: Tilburg University

No 19051, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: During World War II, Moroccan soldiers serving in the French army committed widespread acts of sexual violence against the Italian population, known in Italy as the Marocchinate. We demonstrate that these events led to contagion in prejudice: They triggered a pronounced shift toward the far right following the recent large influx of migrants from Syria, the Middle East, and North Africa. Survey results identify similarity-based activation of collective memory as a likely channel. We thus provide the first real-world evidence that selective recall operates on collective memory and can extend prejudice to unrelated out-groups.

Keywords: collective memory; contagion; WWII; associative recall (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D91 N34 N44 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-10
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