Work in progress

Manuscripts

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Sascha Riaz, Julian Voss. “Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany.” Manuscript. 2025.

Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is notoriously challenging due to preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda. We introduce a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. Our empirical analysis draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets. Using Large Language Models for OCR and data labeling, we detect expressions of regime support, such as praise for Hitler, National Socialism, or the Fatherland, in approximately 600,000 obituaries. Our approach yields the first spatially and temporally granular measure of Nazi regime support during World War II. Our descriptive findings nuance the prevailing historical consensus: we find that regime loyalty began to erode immediately following the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, not after the Battle of Stalingrad. By contrast, militaristic rhetoric emphasizing soldiers’ heroism persisted at high levels throughout the war.

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. 2025.

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.

Physical symbols that represent institutions of power, nations, or individual leaders have been a feature of politics since ancient times. When and why do governments erect such politically symbolic buildings and monuments, and do they have tangible consequences on, e.g., citizens’ beliefs or behavior? Systematic data-based answers to these questions have been obstructed by the lack of comparable measures that extend across countries and over time. Hence, we collect and make publicly available detailed data on three ubiquitous features of symbolic politics pertaining to, respectively, institutionalized power, nations, and leaders: (1) government and legislative buildings, (2) mega-flagpoles, and (3) leader statues. We elaborate on the concept of symbolic political structures and discuss how they may be conceived as credible commitment devices, before we detail and evaluate our new data. To illustrate how the data may be used, we show that investment in symbolic structures meaningfully varies with leader- and regime features. For instance, personalist dictators are particularly likely to build more and higher statues and change residencies than democratic leaders. Our new data helps to advance comparative research on symbolic politics and provide new measures for hard-to-observe regime features, such as regime legitimation.