Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians' indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that reinforce hostility towards war opponents, increase identification with their nation, and thereby strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1. To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on all 8.6 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level death rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with high death rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a culture of war commemoration.

Previous research has demonstrated that ruling elites hand-pick top-level cadres from their personal networks to maximize loyalty. However, similar personal networks also exist among the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats on lower levels of the administrative hierarchy. We undertake the first empirical analysis of such networks, focusing on a least-likely case: the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). The regime’s highly formalized socialist cadre policy should have left little room for a strong role of informal ties in bureaucratic careers. We draw on detailed biographical data on over 370,000 cadres to investigate if decentralized networks nonetheless shaped promotion practices in the GDR’s bureaucracy. We reconstruct the composition of local work collectives---a center of personal commitment, friendship, and mutual help in the GDR. We demonstrate a substantive role of decentralized career networks in cadres’ career trajectories, highlighting a so-far underappreciated element of personalized networks in autocracies.

We investigate if ethnic representation in power-sharing pacts alleviates political, economic, or social grievances for citizens in post-conflict countries. To link individuals and post-conflict elites theoretically, we conceptualize rebel groups as ethno-political organizations. These organizations can only address political, economic, social grievances when a peace agreement propels them into a powerful position to do so, typically in form of a power-sharing pact between rebel and government elites. As a result, we expect that individuals with ethnic ties to rebel organizations in a past power-sharing pact perceive generally improved political, economic conditions, and inter-ethnic relations. To investigate these propositions, we link data from recent Afrobarometer surveys to information on individuals' ethnic ties to rebel organizations in power-sharing arrangements in three African post-conflict countries. Results from a wide range of fixed effects specifications show that representation in ethnic power-sharing results in perceptions of mitigated general political, economic, and inter-ethnic grievances.