Essays in the political economy of institutional change

Bosshart, Luis (2025) Essays in the political economy of institutional change. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This thesis examines three topics in the political economy of institutional change. I focus on the direction of state development after war and the design of interventions shifting social norms. Chapter 1 studies a transition to democracy, asking whether states and societies can shift social norms. Chapter 2 analyzes the rise of autocracy, examining the type of state that emerges in response to war. Chapter 3 explores how narratives of the past change present politics. I study these questions by combining large and novel datasets with robust research designs for identifying causal relationships. A central aim is to understand the conditions and identify interventions under which persistent social equilibria can be overcome. The first chapter, Shifting Norms and Political Demand: Denazification in postwar Germany, studies whether states and societies can shift social norms. In a major denazification program, millions of Germans were questioned about their political past by courts. The chapter documents how denazification shaped the emerging political landscape in postwar Germany. I leverage sharp variation in denazification across Allied occupation zones, across districts, and within districts. I find that broader denazification reduced the demand for nationalist policies and changed social norms. Differences are driven by mass rather than elite cases and political consequences are observed absent major differences in punishment. The results indicate that the breadth of transitional justice may be more important than its severity. As such, the study has important implications for the design of transitional justice following autocratic rule. The second chapter, Crisis, State Capacity, and the Rise of Autocracy: A Design-based Analysis of the Thirty Years’ War (joint with Matthias Weigand), analyzes whether wars enable autocracy. We examine how the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest conflict in pre-modern Europe, gave rise to capable autocracies. We use planned troop movements from secret military communications to estimate the impact of town-level war exposure on the growth of fiscal and military capacity and the dismantling of parliaments. During the war, executive power increased to prevent plunder and coordinate military logistics. After the war, rulers used this capacity to consolidate autocratic rule via propaganda and repression. Pre-existing legal institutions acted as a barrier to war-induced autocracy. With parliaments eliminated, militarized absolutist regimes persisted for centuries and provided fewer public goods. Our findings highlight a dynamic trade-off in the concentration of executive power during crises. The third chapter, Mass Media of Remembering: The Role of TV in Coming to Terms with the Past, studies how mass media shapes collective memory and voting behavior, focusing on the broadcast of a Holocaust documentary in West Germany in 1979. I leverage an unexpected disruption in television access caused by right-wing extremist attacks on transmission towers. Due to these attacks, hundreds of thousands of viewers near affected towers were unable to watch the documentary. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, I compare electoral outcomes between neighboring municipalities with and without television access. The results show that access to the documentary reduced the trend of radical-right vote share by 0.1 to 0.23 percentage points. A placebo test based on a failed bombing accounts for strategic targeting and confirms the result.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2025 Luis Bosshart
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Sets:	Departments > Government
Supervisor:	Dittmar, Jeremiah and Wolton, Stephane
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4891

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