"Contagious Populists: The Impact of Election Information Shocks on Populist Party Preferences in Germany", with Kim Leonie Kellermann, European Journal of Political Economy, 72, 1-34, available here (2022).
This study analyzes the role of social contagion in populist party support. Although the emergence of the German right-wing populist AfD was accompanied by controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, electoral support has followed a clear upward trend. We analyze the impact of information shocks with respect to aggregate-level support for the AfD on individual vote intentions. Unexpectedly high aggregate support for a populist party may indicate a higher social acceptance of its platform and reduce the social desirability bias in self-reported vote intentions. Consequently, the likelihood that an individual will reveal an AfD vote intention increases. We test this mechanism in an event-study approach, exploiting quasi-random variation in survey interviews conducted around the time of German state elections. We define election information shocks as deviations of actual AfD vote shares from pre-election polls and we link these shocks to an individual’s likelihood of reporting an AfD vote intention in subsequent survey interviews. Our results suggest that exposure to higher-than-expected AfD support significantly increases the probability of reporting an AfD vote intention by up to 2.7 percentage points. Testing alternative mechanisms, we find that this increase is in fact driven by reduced reputational concerns associated with expressing populist support.
"Rebellious Youth: Evidence on the Link between Youth Bulges, Institutional Bottlenecks, and Conflict", CESifo Economic Studies, 1–40 (2018).
This paper investigates the relationship between large youth cohorts and civil conflicts. While it has been frequently stated that countries with an exceptionally youthful population are more prone to violent con icts, we argue that the rebellious potential of a youth bulge depends on the presence of institutional bottlenecks in general, and labor-market restrictions in particular, as these constraints lower the youth-speci c cost of engaging in insurrection activities. We test how labor-market restrictions, as approximated by changes in unemployment, interact with the relative youth cohort size in determining the aggregate conflict risk for a sample of non-OECD countries for the post-Cold War period. Exploiting exogenous variation in the demographic structure by measuring the size of the youth cohort when its members where born, our results suggest that youth bulges constitute the demographic environment in which rising unemployment is more likely to trigger social tensions and violent conflicts. Moreover, we find that the degree to which large youth cohorts raise the probability of a conflict onset depends more generally on the quality of labor and business regulation, political institutions as well as ethnic tensions.
"Youth Bulges, Insurrections, and Labor-Market Restrictions", with Thomas Apolte, Public Choice, 175(1–2), 63–93 (2018).
This paper analyzes the link between large youth cohorts and violent conflicts when labor-market restrictions are present. Such restrictions are expected to limit the youth cohort’s access to income opportunities in the formal economy, and thus lower the youth-specific opportunity cost of insurrection activities. We develop a theoretical model of insurrection markets and integrate the youth cohort’s relative size. In equilibrium, a binding labor-market constraint interacts with the youth bulge in determining the level of insurrection activities within the society. We test the implications of our model on a sample of 135 non-OECD countries in the post-Cold War period and find the effect of the youth cohort’s relative size on conflict onsets to be moderated by changes in the labor-market conditions as measured by unemployment rates. Generally, the results provide evidence that the underlying institutional setting shapes the conflict potential inherent in a given demographic structure.
"Urban Protests, Coups d’état and Post-Coup Regime Change", Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 23(4) (2017).
This study investigates the impact of urban protests on coup attempts and subsequent regime change in a sample of 39 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period from 1990 to 2007. Widespread public discontent, especially when occurring in urban centers, can act as a trigger of coups d’état in autocratic regimes. Yet, it is less clear how elites respond to protests in terms of post-coup institutional change and democratization. To account for potential endogeneity of protests and coups, variation in rainfall is used as an instrument for urban protests. The results show that rainfall-related urban protests raise the likelihood that a coup is staged, but have no effect on subsequent democratization.