Luis Bosshart

PhD Candidate
London School of Economics
l.s.bosshart@lse.ac.uk

I work on political economy and study how institutions shape political and economic development over time. I’m currently a PhD candidate in the Government Department at the London School of Economics. [CV]

Crisis, State Capacity, and the Making of Autocracy: A Design-based Analysis of the Thirty Years‘ War, with M. Weigand
Abstract
Do wars enable autocracy? We document the rise of capable autocracies in response to the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest conflict in pre-modern Europe. We use planned troop movements from secret military communications to estimate how town-level war exposure led to the growth of local fiscal-military capacity and the dismantling of parliaments. Collective action, through town alliances and litigation against the ruler, prevented war-induced autocracy. Where parliaments were eliminated, absolutist regimes persisted for centuries, repressed local democratic institutions, and provided fewer public goods. Our findings highlight a potential dynamic trade-off in the concentration of executive power during crises.

Political Competition and Economic Divergence: European Development Before and After the Black Death, with J. Dittmar
Abstract [Video]
We document how an economic shock activated political competition as a driver of development and generated a major economic divergence within Europe. We focus on an exogenous labor supply shock, the arrival of the Black Death in 1348, which induced distributional conflict between rulers and cities, and made political competition a binding constraint on rulers. We develop disaggregated panel data on urban and agricultural development and link these outcomes to the structure of political competition among rulers. Our identification strategy uses the exogenous shock and sharp variation in political competition along a previous border to compare the development of otherwise similar neighboring cities in the low political competition East and high competition West of Europe. Before the shock, differences in political competition did not drive differences in development; afterward, urban construction and city institutional development fell by 1/3 where political competition was low. We confirm the mechanism holds instrumenting for political competition with dynastic shocks just before the Black Death. We show this urban divergence shifted outside options for agricultural labor and predicts the subsequent adoption of labor coercion.

Shifting Norms and Political Demand: Denazification in postwar Germany
Abstract
Can states and societies shift social norms at scale? In a major denazification program, millions of Germans were questioned about their political past by courts. I document how denazification shaped the emerging political landscape in postwar Germany. Using three identification strategies, I find that broader denazification reduced the demand for nationalist policies and changed social norms. Differences seem 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 policies following autocratic rule.

Work in Progress

Red Zones: Forced Displacement and Support for Far-Right Parties, with E. Dinas, F. Foos, and V. Fouka

Trade Shock and Political Development, with J. Dittmar 

Mass Media of Remembering: The Role of TV in Coming to Terms with the Nazi Past