Working Papers

The Origins of Elite Persistence: Evidence from Political Purges in post-World War II France

with T. Aidt and P.-G. Méon

This paper studies a new mechanism that allows political elites from a non-democratic regime to survive a democratic transition: connections. We document this mechanism in the transition from the Vichy regime to democracy in post-World War II France. The parliamentarians who had supported the Vichy regime were purged in a two-stage process where each case was judged twice by two different courts. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that Law graduates, a powerful social group in French politics with strong connections to one of the two courts, had a clearance rate that was 10 percentage points higher than others. This facilitated the persistence of that elite group. A systematic analysis of 17,589 documents from the defendants' dossiers is consistent with the hypothesis that the connections of Law graduates to one of the two courts were a major driver of their ability to avoid the purge. We consider and rule out alternative mechanisms.

Domino Secessions: Evidence from the U.S.

with K. Mitchener & K. Oosterlinck

We analyze how secession movements unfold and the interdependence of regions’ decisions to secede. We first model and then empirically examine how secessions can occur sequentially because the costs of secession decrease with the number of seceders and because regions update their decisions based on whether other regions decide to secede. We verify the existence of these “domino secessions” using the canonical case of the secession of southern U.S. states in the 1860s. We establish that financial markets priced in the costs of secession to geographically-specific assets (state bonds) after Lincoln’s election in the fall of 1860 – long before war broke out. We then show that state bond yields reflect the decreasing costs of secession in two ways. First, as the number of states seceding increased, yields on the bonds of states that had already seceded fell. Second, seceding states with more heterogeneous voters had higher risk premia, reflecting investors beliefs that further sub-secession was more likely in these locations.

The Church as Arbiter: A Divided Right in Interwar France

with C. Boix

We leverage the condemnation of L’Action Française (AF), a monarchist movement, by Pope Pius XI in 1926, to investigate the impact of elite choices on the fortunes of a democratic right and an authoritarian right in interwar Europe. As a consequence of the Papal condemnation, French Catholics had to choose between their involvement in AF and accessing Catholic sacraments. Difference-in-differences estimates show that the Papal condemnation reshaped AF’s territorial distribution and social basis, weakening its support in religious areas while attracting more secularized followers. Following that shift, AF mutated from being a conservative nationalist movement with strong Catholic connections to an extreme organization entangled with a violent and antiparliamentarian Right. Our examination of the role of elites in the development of political movements allows us to shed new light on the dynamics that resulted in the collapse of democracy in interwar Europe.