Work in progress

Book project

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Jan Pierskalla. Cadres and Careers: Indoctrination and Bureaucratic Loyalty in the German Democratic Republic. Book manuscript.

Why do authoritarian regimes that look formidable sometimes dissolve so quickly when they are finally tested? This book argues that the answer lies in how dictatorships manufacture the loyalty of the ordinary state agents who administer, surveil, and repress on their behalf. Unable to buy loyalty through patronage or enforce it through terror at scale, many regimes turn to mass indoctrination. We argue that indoctrination is only partially effective: teaching people the script of loyalty is fast and cheap, while changing their underlying convictions is neither. Scaling indoctrination therefore produces some new true believers, but many more skilled careerists—and it erodes the screening value of the very signals the regime uses to tell the two apart. In the short run this stabilizes the regime; in the long run it accumulates structural debts in the form of bureaucratic lethargy and a growing surveillance tax.

We test this argument in the German Democratic Republic, drawing on the regime’s own Central Cadre Database—retrospective career histories for nearly 370,000 cadres, roughly seven million person-years covering effectively the universe of politically significant positions in East Germany. Treating the regime’s own institutional reforms as natural experiments, we trace the effects of indoctrination across three domains: the Free German Youth (FDJ), military service in the Nationale Volksarmee after the 1962 introduction of conscription, and socialist work brigades in the workplace. In each case the same pattern recurs: system engagement and low-cost loyalty signals rise, the costliest signals do not, and the screening value of membership erodes as the organization scales. A final chapter follows these micro-level dynamics up to the regime level, from the crises the cadre state survived to the autumn of 1989, when a bureaucracy that had learned to perform loyalty rather than exercise it stood by as the regime fell.

Manuscripts

Felix Haass, Jan Pierskalla. “Child Penalties in Autocratic Bureaucracies: Motherhood, Loyalty Signals, and Career Paths in the German Democratic Republic.” Manuscript. 2026.

Many autocracies publicly emphasize gender equality and adopt policies to foster women’s career advancement, yet the higher echelons of their bureaucracies remain overwhelmingly male. What explains this discrepancy? While gender and child penalties are well documented in Western labor markets, far less is known about comparable penalties inside autocratic bureaucracies. We study the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a hard test for finding child penalties given strong equality laws and extensive public childcare. Analyzing biographical data for more than 370,000 cadres, we find a large and persistent motherhood penalty: women’s promotion prospects fall sharply after the first birth, while men’s careers continue on trend with an additional fatherhood premium. Additional analyses indicate that motherhood reduces the voluntary party and civic activities through which cadres signaled regime loyalty. These findings have important implications for understanding bureaucratic politics in autocracies and the gendered legacies of autocratic rule.

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Sascha Riaz, Julian Voss. “Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany.” Manuscript. 2026.

What factors shape regime loyalty in autocracies during international war? We study Nazi Germany using more than 75,000 soldier obituaries to construct the first spatially and temporally granular measure of regime loyalty over the course of the war. We examine how loyalty changed in response to major wartime events, over the longer trajectory of the war, and across varying levels of exposure to military losses. We find no detectable short-run changes following Stalingrad, ration cuts, a prominent public challenge by the Catholic Church, or Allied bombing. The most pronounced break occurs around the invasion of the Soviet Union, after which regime loyalty follows a sustained and substantively meaningful downward trend, coinciding with a sharp increase in military deaths. While casualties at the county and neighborhood levels do not appear to dampen loyalty, we find that losses within families are associated with reduced expressions of loyalty to the regime. These findings suggest that regime loyalty in wartime autocracies may be less responsive to individual high-profile events than to longer-run processes through which citizens personally experience the costs of war.

Felix Haass, Alexander De Juan, Daniel Bischof, Henry Thomson. “Representation Without Power: Far Right Electoral Success and Violence in Weimar Germany.” Manuscript. 2026.

Far right parties often win elections without gaining access to power. Do such outcomes pacify extremist movements, or can they fuel violence? We study this question in Weimar Germany after the July 1932 Reichstag election, when the Nazi Party became the largest parliamentary force but remained outside government. We digitize Nazi candidate lists and Prussian police records on street violence, linking riots to candidates’ home towns. Using a regression discontinuity design around district list cutoffs, we compare towns whose Nazi candidates narrowly entered parliament with towns whose candidates narrowly missed. Post-election Nazi-communist violence was substantially higher in towns represented by elected Nazi MPs, while no discontinuity appears before the election. Mechanism evidence from perpetrator coding, stormtrooper mood reports, and membership records suggests that representation without power redirected frustration toward the movement’s violent wing. The findings show that electoral representation can intensify anti-democratic violence when far right parties win mandates but remain excluded from power.

Felix Haass. “Selective university admissions as a strategy of autocratic rule.” Manuscript. 2026.

Universities present a dilemma for autocrats: they are often fertile grounds for anti-regime protests, but also necessary for educating a skilled workforce. I investigate a strategy that defuses this dilemma before costly repression and indoctrination become necessary: preferential admission of regime-loyal students. Autocrats, however, do not reward loyalty uniformly. They carefully calibrate which loyalty signals count where: in fields whose graduates are likely to generate dissent and hard to monitor—the social sciences and humanities—only hard-to-fake signals of ideological conviction, such as party membership, improve admission chances; in fields more relevant for economic productivity—the natural and technical sciences—even signals of mere compliance, such as youth-organization membership, help admission. I find empirical support for these implications using detailed admission records from more than 220,000 university applications in the former German Democratic Republic. By unpacking a key repressive strategy, this study clarifies how universities can help to stabilize autocracies.

Alexander De Juan, Felix Haass, Finn Klebe. “Does Repression Work? Evidence from Prisoner Records in the German Democratic Republic.” Manuscript. 2026.

Does autocratic state repression work? Existing evidence is ambiguous: repression may raise the costs of mobilization and signal regime resolve, but it may also forge dissident networks and radicalize the opposition. Specifying its effects has been difficult for two reasons: micro-level records on who is repressed are rarely available, so most evidence is aggregated to spatial units; and the assignment of repression is itself endogenous to individuals’ prior dissent. We address both problems using administrative records on more than 270,000 prisoner spells in the German Democratic Republic (1979–1991), combined with a natural experiment: the general amnesty of 12 October 1987, which released tens of thousands of prisoners within weeks. Because the amnesty suspended rather than erased custodial sentences, the unserved remainder was reinstated upon reconviction—so released prisoners faced sharply different expected punishments depending only on how far into their sentence they happened to be. We exploit this variation in residual sentences to estimate the effect of expected punishment on subsequent political and non-political re-imprisonment.

Haakon Gjerløw, Felix Haass, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Jonas W. Schmid. “Monuments of Might. Symbolic Political Structures across the World.” Manuscript, 2026.

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? Answers that generalize across many countries and long time spans have so far been constrained by the lack of measures that are coded consistently across various contexts. 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.