States often engage in internal purges to eliminate political dissidents within their own ranks. However, partly because of the absence of reliable data, we know little about the logic and dynamics of these purges, particularly of lower-rank members of the state. Why do state authorities persecute these individuals when they do not entail a clear threat to the regime? We focus on the purges of public-school teachers during the early years of Francisco Franco’s regime in Spain. Using detailed historical sources, we explore whether teachers were more likely to be purged following the two main cleavages in 1930s Spain: the left-right divide and the center-periphery (i.e. nationalist) cleavage. Our results suggest that whilst the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was still unfolding Francoist authorities targeted teachers from leftist localities, thus focusing on potential security threats behind the frontlines. After winning the war, Francoists switched their targeting to teachers from national minority groups in order to promote nation-building policies leading to their assimilation. Our findings highlight the double logic of purging as both a pre-emptive measure against internal threats and a nation-building tool.The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions. The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv) detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.

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