How Autocratic Bureaucrats Prevent Democratization: Evidence from Weimar Germany

• In Event: Democracy under Stress: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

A distinctive feature of the first German transition to democracy after World War I was the absence of meaningful democratizing reform of the sprawling federal, state, and local bureaucracies. In this paper, I argue that insufficient efforts to reform a deeply anti-democratic state apparatus prevented the consolidation of democratic governance in the Interwar period. The paper combines original county-level career data on local police chiefs, information on incidents of politically motivated violence and biographical data on the universe of candidates for elected office with secondary voting and census data. Leveraging a difference-in-differences design, I demonstrate that counties where police chiefs appointed prior to democratization were replaced by bureaucrats vetted by democratic governments subsequently saw (i) lower levels of politically motivated violence, (ii) higher proportions of women and Jewish Germans running for office, and (iii) lower levels of voter support for the Nazi party, compared to counties without personnel turnover. I provide quantitative and qualitative evidence suggesting that local police chiefs appointed prior to democratization routinely engaged in bureaucratic sabotage, undermining efforts by the central government to pacify the political space and curb activities by extremist organizations. My paper identifies the persistence of autocratic bureaucracies as a crucial obstacle to democratic consolidation and efforts to limit political violence.

Author

• Moritz Emanuel Bondeli, Yale University