Work in progress

Manuscripts

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.

Haakon Gjerløw, Felix Haass, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jonas W. Schmid. “Monuments of Might. Symbolic Political Structures across the World.” Manuscript, 2024.