Research

How do social ties between administrators and defendants affect the implementation of personnel transitional justice policies? To address issues of inherited personnel, countries undergoing transitions from autocratic rule frequently implement mechanisms like purges or criminal trials. While a considerable number of studies investigates the consequences of these policies, less is known about factors that shape their implementation. Building on insights from administration research, I analyze how differences in social ties shape the outcomes of a mass purge by drawing on data of approx. 50000 denazification trials from British occupied Nazi Germany. I investigate the effects of two different forms of ties: social identity and networks. I leverage variation regarding the level of ties between administrators and defendants resulting from the delegation of denazification to German authorities and defendants' different migratory backgrounds. My results point to an ambivalent effect of ties in the context of transitional justice policies: while identity ties lead to more lenient ruling, network ties seem to have the opposite effect. The study's findings shed new light on transitional justice and the persistence of political personnel in the shadow of dictatorship.

How does right-wing political violence affect electoral support for populist radical right parties? Recent research has produced contrary answers to this question: right-wing violence can fuel right-wing support in some instances and reduce it in others. We exploit a natural experiment to explain this heterogeneity. Drawing on high-frequency survey data before and after the most intense terrorist attack in recent German history we show that right-wing terror reduced support for the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland - a finding we replicate in a controlled survey experiment. Additional analyses of survey data, media content, and social media posts show that the negative effect of right-wing violence is a function of a public backlash that links radical right party platforms to the violence. Our findings help to better understand the conditions under which political violence triggers partisan detachment and have important implications for media responsibility in the aftermath of right-wing violence.

How do voters respond to information about corruption? Research investigating electoral responses to corruption has thus far generated mixed results and research in this area generally faces a number of methodological problems. While observational studies linking aggregate corruption levels and political behavior usually raise concerns about endogeneity, experimental methods may suffer from problems like social desirability bias or a lack of external validity. In this paper, I bypass these issues by analyzing a natural experiment generated by a corruption scandal around the procurement of face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. I exploit the differential exposure to the corruption scandal of mail and ballot-box voters prior to a major regional election in a difference-in-differences design. Comparing electoral outcomes across mail and ballot-box electorates in 1109 municipalities over time, I find that corruption leads to a reduction of the affected party's vote share of approximately 5\% in the exposed electorate. Furthermore, I find similar effects for the party's coalition partner indicating that corruption may produce negative spillovers for other incumbent parties. This study sheds new light on corruption and voting behavior by showing that misconduct by public officials can produce substantive electoral responses that have the potential to move well beyond an affected party.

This study investigates how individual beliefs regarding punitive transitional justice measures shape the support for policies of remembrance. While previous research on transitional justice has predominantly focused on its immediate consequences, less is known about long-term consequences and the potential for unintended side-effects. We investigate such potential “hidden long-term costs” of punitive transitional justice in the case of the Denazification of Germany after WWII. We implement an online survey in a sample of approx. 2000 German voters. To assess the effect of different perceptions regarding the extent of punitive transitional justice, we (1) manipulate respondents’ beliefs regarding the degree to which Nazi perpetrators have been sanctioned through Denazification in a survey experiment and (2) exploit historical variation in the intensity of Denazification across former occupation zones.

We examine the political effects of exposure to in-group atrocities. We study the controversial “Wehrmacht Exhibition” (1995–1999), which for the first time exposed the German public to gruesome details about crimes committed by the German army during WWII. The traveling exhibition challenged the ‘myth of the clean Wehrmacht’: the post-war consensus that Hitler and the Nazi Party alone designed the war of annihilation and that war crimes were only committed by the SS. To study how different segments of the electorate reacted to the exhibition, we leverage high-frequency survey data of more than 160,000 voters in a staggered difference- in-differences setup. Our findings indicate that the exhibition triggered political backlash, particularly among younger men who were not eligible for WWII conscription. To examine the mechanisms underlying this result, we propose to (1) analyze letters to the editor relating to the exhibition and (2) conduct a contemporary survey experiment.