Work in progress

Manuscripts

Stephen Dawson, Felix Haass, Carl Müller-Crepon, Aksel Sundström. “The Ethnic Politics of Nature Protection: Ethnic Favoritism and Protected Areas in Africa.” Manuscript. 2024.

Nature protected areas are hailed as an institutional solution to the global biodiversity crisis. However, conservation entails local economic costs for some communities and benefits for others. We propose that the establishment of protected areas in Africa follows an ethno-political logic which implies that governments distribute protected areas such that their ethnic constituencies are shielded from their costs but enjoy their benefits. We test this argument using continent-wide data on ethnic groups’ power status and protected area establishment since independence. Difference-in-differences models show that political inclusion decreases nature protection in groups’ settlement areas. Yet, this effect is reversed for protected areas that plausibly generate tourism income. We also find that ethno-political inclusion is linked to legal degradation of protected areas. Our findings on the ethno-political underpinnings of nature protection support long-voiced concerns by activists that politically marginalized groups carry disproportional costs of nature conservation.

Felix Haass, Alexander De Juan, Daniel Bischof, Henry Thomson. “Parliamentary representation and right-wing violence: Evidence from Nazi street brawls in the Weimar Republic.” Manuscript. 2024.

A core promise of democratic elections is to transform political violence into non-violent, institutionalized conflict in parliament. But elections can also incite bloodshed: they can trigger grievances among election losers and equip election winners who oppose democracy—such as the fascist right—with resources to orchestrate even more violence. Does parliamentary representation curb or fuel right-wing street violence? We investigate this question in the context of the July 1932 Reichstag elections in Weimar Germany. We match the home towns of Nazi party candidates to locations of street violence from digitized Prussian police records. Exploiting the randomness between candidates who did and did not receive just enough votes to attain a Reichstag seat we identify the effects of Nazi representation in parliament on street brawls in the Weimar Republic. Initial results indicate that parliamentary representation led to more street violence in elected candidates’ home towns, especially when NSDAP candidates had links to the Nazi paramilitary organization, the SA. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of post-election violence, consequences of right-wing representation, and democratic stability.

Felix Haass. “Selective university admissions as a strategy of autocratic rule.” Manuscript. 2024.

Universities present dictators with a dilemma: they are often fertile grounds for anti-regime protests, but also necessary for educating a skilled workforce that ensures economic productivity. Solving this dilemma through indoctrination and repression can be costly and inefficient. I propose a third strategy autocrats use to resolve the protest/productivity trade-off: strategic student admissions. By admitting more loyal students, indoctrination becomes easier and monitoring less costly. To counter efficiency problems, however, autocrats enforce admission criteria selectively: they value loyalty signals more in fields with a higher potential of generating dissent—history, arts, or culture—and less strongly in fields less prone to critical thinking and more relevant for economic productivity—medicine, technology, or sciences. I find empirical support for these implications using fine-grained, individual-level admission records from more than 300,000 university applications in the former German Democratic Republic. By unpacking a key strategy of autocratic rule this study yields important implications for understanding the role of universities for democratization.

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Julian Voß. “Right-wing terror, public backlash, and voting preferences for the far right.” Manuscript, 2024.

Over the last decade, many western countries have experienced a surge in right-wing violence and a growing public support for populist radical right parties (PRRP). Previous research suggests that right-wing political mobilization can inspire right-wing violence. However, we know little on the opposite direction of this relationship: how does right-wing violence influence voting preferences for the far right? In this research note, we implement an ``unexpected event during survey’’ design to investigate this question. We draw on data from daily surveys on party preferences to analyze temporal shifts in support for the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) before and after the most intense terrorist attack in recent German history. Our findings indicate that right-wing terrorism can have substantive but short-lived negative effects on public support for PRRP. Results of exploratory analyses are in line with the argument that these effects result from a public backlash against PRRP that alienates potential voters.

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Jan Pierskalla. “Cadre networks and bureaucratic careers in autocracies.” Manuscript, 2024.

Research on autocratic regimes demonstrates how personal networks matter in the selection of top-level cadres. Similar personal networks exist among the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats on lower levels of the administrative hierarchy. To what extent do personal ties shape cadre selection at mid- and low tiers of an autocratic hierarchy? Do personal networks support or hamper regime goals? We undertake the first empirical analysis of such networks, focusing on a least likely case: the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). We draw on detailed biographical data on over 370,000 cadres to investigate how cadre networks shaped promotion practices. We reconstruct the composition of local work collectives—a center of personal commitment, friendship, and mutual help in the GDR. We demonstrate the substantive role of cadre networks for career trajectories. Our evidence suggests cadre networks served as effective screening tools to identify capable candidates, contributing to overall regime resilience.

Haakon Gjerløw, Felix Haass, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jonas W. Schmid. “Measuring Symbolic Politics: Introducing New Data on Buildings and Monuments from across the World.” Manuscript, 2024.