joint with Richard Bluhm, Tobias Korn
This study examines the effects of the violent repression of independence movements on ethnic politics and social cohesion. We exploit local variation in the intensity of repression to analyze the long-run impacts of British detention camps in 1950s colonial Kenya. Using a rich body of census and survey data and a triple-difference design, we show that exposure to a detention camp increases ethnic voting in the contested 2007 presidential election and erodes contemporary trust. In addition, we show that affected individuals accumulate less wealth, are less literate, and have poorer labor market outcomes three to five decades after the event.
joint with Julia Zimmermann, Marvin Suesse & Andrei Markevich
Governments often introduce limited political reforms to stabilize autocratic regimes, yet institutional openings frequently coincide with political violence. This paper examines when partial democratization pacifies dissent and when it instead reorganizes opposition toward clandestine activity. We study the introduction of local self-government (zemstvo) in late Imperial Russia, exploiting variation in the reform’s adoption across European Russia and its staggered implementation over time. Within treated districts, statutory voting rules generated discontinuous differences in elite control of assemblies. To measure underground mobilization, we construct and geocode a novel dataset of approximately 21,000 anti-Tsarist activists with individual-level information on social background and tactical choices. We find that the average effect of institutional opening on opposition is close to zero. However, in districts where assemblies were dominated by landed elites, reform reduced visible, low-risk dissent but increased clandestine, high-intensity violence. Where political power was less concentrated, institutional opening reduced both forms of opposition. These findings show that partial democratization can reorganize rather than reduce dissent when political inclusion is not credible.
joint with Richard Bluhm, Raphaël Franck & Raphael H. Heiberger
Whether popular protest leads political representatives to become more radical or more conciliatory remains an open question. This study examines how episodes of crowd violence in Paris during the French Revolution affected the language and decisions of deputies in the National Convention. By linking daily reports of unrest to the home addresses, speeches, and roll-call votes of individual deputies, we trace how immediate exposure to street mobilization shaped their rhetoric and political behavior. The analysis asks whether proximity to protest encouraged deputies to use more extreme language and radical votes, or instead induced moderation and restraint. Through this approach, the study contributes to a better understanding of how external pressure from popular movements influenced deliberation and decision-making within one of the first modern representative assemblies. In a first set of results, we find that the direct exposure to street-level violence decreases the likelihood of radical choices in the roll call votes on the fate of Louis XVI.
This study investigates whether the promotion of liberal ideology can have a lasting impact on contemporary behavior, by exploiting the random exile settlements of an educated elite to the Russian Empire's 'Hinterland' as a quasi-natural experiment. It uses the locations of the failed Decembrist insurgents sent to Siberia and other remote areas of Russia, and matches them with the household locations of contemporary surveys. The results show that individuals that live within 10 km proximity of at least one Decembrist' exile location, are more likely to participate in informal and formal political activities, and are more inclined toward liberal values.
joint with Raphaël Franck
working paper (March 2022) download via CESifo
resubmitted to the Journal of Economic History
This study analyzes how state capacity shapes the local impact of national policies by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in the regional expansion of the state. It uses the local discontinuity created by the boundary of the largest peasant rebellion in 18th century Russia where the state increased security forces and levied taxes more efficiently after the uprising ended. The results show that increased state capacity had limited effects on economic growth until the central government targeted specific development objectives. Namely, when rulers chose to build schools or foster industrialization, their national policies benefited areas which already had strong state capacity.
joint with Vera Z. Eichenauer, Andreas Fuchs, Bradley Parks
access to the data via indiandevelopmentfinance.net
working paper (September 2021) download via AidData
accepted at the Journal of Conflict Resolution
China and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This paper explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China. We build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countries demonstrate that India's Exim Bank is significantly more likely to locate a project in a given jurisdiction if China provided government financing there in the previous year. Since this effect is more pronounced in countries where India is more popular relative to China and where both lenders have a similar export structure, we interpret this as evidence of India competing with China. By contrast, we do not find evidence that China uses official aid or credit to compete with India through co-located projects.
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