Social networks in the Spanish Civil War

In this project, a joint work with Sergi Martínez, we are interested in how social network position influences an individual’s decision to participate in an insurgency. Does social proximity to ideologically committed individuals or local leaders shape the incentives to take arms? And how do these local incentives interact with the coercive force of the state?
To study these questions we focus on the pro-Franco mobilization in the province of Navarre during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). We undertook a major digitization effort of large, untapped archival data, to reconstruct pre-war social and political networks in every village of the province, covering the full voting-age population (insurgents and non-insurgents).

Follow-up projects will explore the relationship between network position and victimization.

The data that have collected or are collecting for this project include:

  • A database of combatants in pro-Franco factions (paramilitary groups and the Spanish Army)
  • The full pre-war electoral census of the province (1934)
  • Individual-level data on the conservative elites involved in pro-Franco mobilization, from newly digitized records of pre-war political clubs
  • Individual-level rosters of Republican militants
  • Victim-level data on Francoist repression during and after the war
  • Polling station tallies measuring individual-level participation in the last pre-war election

Related materials