Measuring regime support in closed autocracies is challenging due to preference falsification and censorship. Professor Alexander De Juan introduces a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty based on expressions of allegiance in 600,000 soldier obituaries published in Nazi Germany (1939–1944). Drawing on a dataset of over one million scanned newspaper pages, he uses large language models (LLMs) for OCR and automated labeling to construct the first spatially and temporally granular measure of Nazi support during WWII. Dr De Juan leverages this data to analyze the political consequences of state repression against the Catholic Church. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, he finds that exposure to anti-church repression led to a significant decline in expressions of regime loyalty. These results demonstrate how state violence against socially embedded institutions can backfire, undermining regime support among the broader population.     

Dr Alexander De Juan is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. His research focuses on political attitudes and behavior under conditions of conflict and autocratic rule, with a particular interest in historical episodes of contention.

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