Did indirect community-level exposure to WW1 casualties facilitate the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany? Mass warfare can promote nationalist attitudes outside of active combat zones by amplifying in-group preferences of returning veterans and relatives affected by traumatic loss. We investigate such localized effects of WW1 on interwar Germany. We combine data on the birthplaces of over 7.5 million war casualties with county-level election results, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in death rates for causal identification. We document a robust and substantial positive effect of indirect war exposure on the Nazi vote share. Analyses of party entries, the role of war monuments, and Nazi autobiographies suggest that war losses foster a stronger in-group orientation of highly war affected communities. These findings advance our understanding of the local impact of WW1 on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the longer-term legacies of indirect exposure to violence on preferences for nationalist ideologies.

Elections are cornerstones for societies transitioning from civil war to democracy. The success or failure of these elections is shaped by the strategies former rebels employ to mobilize voters. Of those strategies, clientelism is particularly important as it represents improved voter-elite relations over dysfunctional wartime politics, but, if pervasive, also risks undermining long-term democratic consolidation. We argue that the organizational legacies of rebellion shape the way how rebels engage in electoral clientelism. We expect that former rebels target pre-electoral benefits to areas of wartime support; rely on wartime military networks to deliver those benefits; and exploit discretionary control over peace dividends when allocating electoral benefits. We combine original geospatial data on the timing and location of over 2,000 tsunami aid projects with village-level surveys in post-civil war Aceh, Indonesia, to test these hypotheses. Results from difference-in-differences models and detailed tests of causal mechanisms are consistent with our theoretical expectations.

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.