PAPERS IN PROGRESS
1. "Democracy Against Itself: Five Responses to Authoritarian Threats from within Democracies"
2. "How Mainstream Politicians Erode Norms: Evidence from Two Survey Experiments" (with Chua, John, Vicente Valentim, & Elias Dinas), Under review
What is the effect of xenophobic rhetoric by mainstream politicians on norms of tolerance? How does this compare to similar statements made by radical-right politicians? In two survey experiments, we find that statements made by mainstream politicians are more likely to lead to norm erosion than those made by radical-right politicians. Subsample analyses suggests that this is because statements by radical-right politicians generate backlash among left-wing individuals, who update their norm perceptions upward. This backlash effect is no longer noticeable when similar statements are made by mainstream right politicians. This difference may be due to mainstream politicians representing the views of a larger part of the population, or having higher status. Our results highlight the pivotal role of mainstream politicians in enforcing or eroding democratic norms. They also show that similar political statements have different effects depending on their sender.
3. "The Gendered Effects of Authoritarian Socialization" (with Nourhan Elseyad, Hanno Hilbig, and Sascha Riaz)
A large literature has studied the effects of socialization under authoritarianism on political attitudes. In this research note, we extend this literature by demonstrating striking gender disparities in the post-transition persistence of these effects. We study the case of authoritarian indoctrination in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) using a regression kink design for causal identification. First, we draw on a unique survey fielded right before reunification to show that education under authoritarianism substantially reduced support for democratic capitalism and reunification with the West. In the second step, we triangulate multiple contemporary data sources to trace the persistence of these effects over time. Three decades after the fall of the GDR, the attitudinal effects of authoritarian indoctrination persist only among men, but not women. Our results highlight considerable heterogeneity in the persistence of authoritarian legacies, raising critical questions about post-authoritarian `re-socialization' and gendered adaptability.
4. "Does Partisan Politicization of Constitutional Courts Affect Judicial Legitimacy: Evidence from Germany" (with Fabio Ellger, Sebastian Hellmeier, and Heiko Giebler)
Judicial independence is often regarded integral to a functioning democracy, and courts require legitimacy among citizens in order to fulfill their role. In times of rising political polarization and democratic backsliding, court decisions and nomination processes are increasingly viewed through a partisan lens. In this paper, we investigate whether politicization can undermine judicial legitimacy even in a case like contemporary German with a robust tradition of judicial independence . Building on process-based and outcome-based approaches to judicial legitimacy, we argue that politicization reduces support for the courts and changes how citizens view nomination processes. We complement existing studies on the US Supreme Court by running a survey experiment in Germany -- a case where the Constitutional Courts are widely seen as trustworthy -- with a representative sample of the German electorate (n= 4,100). In the experiment, we prime respondents with varying information on the level of politicization in the German Constitutional Courts. In addition, we vary the identity of the party that made a recent nomination to the courts. We then ask respondents to evaluate a hypothetical court ruling, and we measure a series of attitudes related to trust in the courts, court-curbing measures and democracy in general. Our results show that respondents in the high-politicization condition are significantly less likely to support the court's verdict. They generally have less trust in courts and demand more political representation regarding the ideological composition of the courts. Our study underlines the fragility of judicial legitimacy in increasingly polarizing democracies and highlights the potentially harmful self-reinforcing dynamic for democratic governance.
5. "The Rise and Fall of National Stigmas: Evidence from Post WW II Germany" (with Elias Dinas & Vasiliki Fouka)
How do nations grapple with a history of past atrocities? Does recognition of historical crimes in public discourse lead citizens to embrace a past that may devalue their national identity, or does it foster backlash and illiberal nationalism? Perhaps no better example of a paradigm of confronting the past exists than the case of post-war Germany, a country marked by the legacy of the Nazi atrocities in World War II. More than half a century later, we ask how public recognition of collective culpability in public discourse, education and culture, has affected German national identity and attitudes towards the country’s history. We conduct a nation-wide representative survey of German-born adults and rely on an experimental treatment to distinguish between private preferences and their public expression. Our findings suggest that the low levels of national pride and muted emotional connection to German history that are expressed by the German public have been internalized, and are not the result of social desirability concerns. Yet a stigma surrounds the public expression of a desire to move on from the historical narrative that emphasizes Germany’s role as perpetrator of atrocities. Our study highlights both the potential for success and the costs of public recognition of a nation’s historical sins.
6. Consequences of Competition Under Autocracy: From Imperial to Weimar Germany (with Volha Charnysh)
How do authoritarian election practices affect democratic political outcomes? We argue that political parties’ uneven access to state resources in a pre-democratic setting has lasting effects on their organizational development and electoral prospects after a democratic transition. When party elites are able to win authoritarian elections through manipulation, they under-invest in formal party organization and fail to cultivate stable voter linkages. After a democratic transition, poorly institutionalized parties are less effective at containing internal disagreements and representing their electorates, which undermines their electoral performance and increases voter defections to anti-system parties. We test this argument using an original district-level dataset on electoral disputes in German elections (1871-1912). We show that pro-regime parties’ greater reliance on electoral manipulation in non-democratic elections predicts bigger electoral losses by their successor parties after democratization and that the Nazi Party secured more votes in districts with a history of electoral manipulation during the Great Depression