Organizer: Indonesia Project, Australian National University

Type/Location: Hybrid / Canberra, Australia

Description:

The 1965–66 anti-communist purge in Indonesia, which caused an estimated 500,000 to one million deaths, had long-lasting social and economic consequences. This paper studies its effects on demographic transition in Java by exploiting regional variation in Communist Party vote share from the 1955 election. Using the 2010 population census, we reconstruct pooled cross-sectional data by year and municipality of birth. We apply a two-way fixed-effects event-study design to examine how mass killings, followed by decades of administrative discrimination, shaped fertility outcomes. We find a delayed but large decline in births in PKI strongholds, driven primarily by reduced marriage rather than fertility within marriage. Contrary to standard displacement narratives of conflict, cohorts born after 1964 are less likely to migrate, relative to pre-1965 cohorts, suggesting that political stigma and constrained economic opportunities inhibited mobility. Mechanism evidence indicates that discriminatory policies toward descendants of communists constrained access to formal employment, limiting marriage and migration. Local political contestation further mediated these effects, consistent with heterogeneous enforcement of repression. These results show how political violence can generate persistent demographic change via household decisions, with implications for labor supply, human capital allocation, and economic development. The study connects political repression, social institutions, and demographic transition, providing evidence on the long-run persistence of conflict-induced constraints.

This ISG will also feature Associate Professor Pierre van der Eng as a discussant.

About the Speaker:

Arif Anindita is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Business and Law at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. His research focuses on family formation and its intersection with conflict and education. Currently, he is studying how the anti-communist purge in 1965-1966 affected the demographic transition in Indonesia. 

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