Essays in political economy and economic history

This thesis consists of three self-contained papers that examine how information and ideologies serve as coordinating forces during episodes of political and social transformation. The first paper studies how shifts in public sentiment can trigger mass mobilization, using the Finnish Civil War of 1918 as a natural experiment. I show that the abrupt abolition of Russian imperial censorship in 1917 produced a sharp surge in oppositional newspaper rhetoric, which in turn accelerated rebel mobilization. Drawing on data on local newspaper subscribership together with newly digitized rebel interrogations, I show that oppositional rhetoric shifted beliefs about the prospects of collective success, while social pressure transformed these beliefs into mass mobilization. Mobilization spread dynamically through local peer networks, with early ideologically motivated participants forming a revolutionary vanguard followed by broader conformist participation. Government repression, however, exerted a powerful demobilizing effect that public opposition could not offset.