Research

This paper investigates whether Germany’s historical confessional divides continue to influence contemporary political behavior by exploiting persistent geographic variation between historically Catholic and Protestant areas through a Geographic Regression Discontinuity Design. Integrating historical and geospatial data with modern electoral and census sources, I find that historically Catholic municipalities show systematically higher support for the center-right Union parties than their counterparts in every federal election from 1990 to 2025, while historically Protestant areas are more likely to support parties on the center-left and left of the political spectrum. Individual-level survey data covering all Federal Elections since 1953  provide suggestive evidence that voting behavior is shaped by confessional affiliation.

In this paper, we reassess the findings of Acemoglu et al. (2019) using the method developed by Bada & Kneip (2014). Once incorporating unobserved factor structures  into the estimation, we show that the effect of democracy on GDP growth diminishes and becomes statistically insignificant. This result challenges previous conclusions and highlights the critical role of addressing unobserved heterogeneity in empirical analyses.