When culture matters: essays on voting, identity and norms

This thesis consists of three self-contained papers that study the role of culture in economics by examining how culture shapes responses to policies, how public interventions influence cultural identity, and how cultural persistence affects economic behavior and policy outcomes. The first chapter examines the political consequences of symbolic changes to public space in Spain, focusing on the renaming of streets honoring figures from the Franco dictatorship. Using three complementary empirical strategies and combining observational and survey evidence, I show that the removal of Francoist street names leads to a significant increase in support for far-right parties in affected areas, particularly when the names had high symbolic salience. Evidence from a novel individual-level survey indicates that this backlash is driven by identity-based concerns rather than practical objections. The second chapter asks whether language policy can reshape cultural identity. We study a 1986 reform in Navarre, Spain, that assigned the Basque language three different legal statuses across municipalities.