The Legacy of Violence

From Collective Vulnerability to Political Alienation

_{Winner of Stuart A. Bremer Travel Award 2024 and Christiane-Rajewsky Award 2024. Presented at ETH Zurich Conflict Colloquium, Peace Science (International) 2024, NEPS 2024, EPSA 2024, the ETH Zurich/HSG retreat 2024, the Swiss Summer School on Democracy Studies 2023, Democracy Studies Forum 2024.}

Wartime violence often affects broad population groups, and its political impact grows when vulnerable communities are concentrated near high-risk areas. When the state fails to act, the heightened salience of the violence can lead to widespread political alienation. I test this using variation in women’s risk of exposure to conflict-related sexual violence in the SBZ/GDR during April-May 1945. My spatially lagged models show that counties with a high proportion of vulnerable population groups living near high-risk areas have lower turnout and state satisfaction.

From Collective Victimization to Partisan Gains: The Role of Issue Ownership (with Douglas B. Atkinson)

_{Presented at NEPS 2024, Fragile Lives 2024, the HSG Political Science Research Seminar 2024, the HSG Literature Seminar 2024, and the BYU Thursday Group 2025.}

Nativist groups often invoke historical collective violence to strengthen in-group identities, though their success varies. We argue that partisan effects of such violence depend on both local victimization and prior party issue ownership, with advantage arising only when the party previously owned the issue. WWII air raids in the former GDR continue to shape contemporary politics, with a higher bombing intensity boosting the issue-owning vote share of Die Linke while reducing support for the nativist AfD. These results highlight the long-term political impact of historical events and the importance of issue ownership in shaping partisan advantages.

From War to Representation: WWII Conscription & Women’s Political Agency (with Douglas B. Atkinson and Kevin Fahey & Vanessa J. Tuttle)

_{Presented at NEPS 2025, the SEPS Research Seminar 2025, and the Workshop on Conflict Dynamics 2024.}

Wars with mass conscription create conditions that boost women’s political representation by encouraging broader social coordination and expanding women’s organizations into more public and political roles. Using the U.S. as a case study, we find that states with higher male conscription in World War II experienced a lasting increase in women’s political representation, showing that crisis-driven investments in civil society and leadership can yield enduring gains for women’s participation.

States in War: No Such Thing as Bad Publicity (with Filippo Pasquali)

_{Presented at Peace Science (International) 2025, the weekly meeting of the International Relations & Data Science research group at ETH Zurich, ECSA 2024, Fragile Lives 2024, and the IPW Summer Retreat 2024.}

The international perception of a state is a critical dimension of its standing, but the conditions under which it changes are poorly understood. We argue that public perception of a state is not merely the sum of individual opinions but a socially constructed sense of collective belief. Individuals are especially likely to revise their views when they perceive those views to be widely shared. We introduce a novel empirical strategy to capture these collective beliefs and measure public perceptions of a state: daily betting odds from the Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s largest music competition – essentially a popularity contest among states.