Inherited wealth has often been accumulated under circumstances seen as illegitimate by present-day standards. However, we know surprisingly little about the political consequences of wealth's history. We argue that illegitimate accumulation nurtures opposition and calls for redistribution, even after multiple generations. To test our theory, we conduct a survey in Germany, where many wealthy business owners inherited companies that made considerable fortunes during one of the darkest episodes of human history, the Nazi regime of 1933-1945. We demonstrate with a vignette experiment that individuals perceive heirs of businesses that cooperated with the Nazi regime as less deserving than other similar heirs, and are more likely to support expropriations. These results align with general views and attitudes about the German economy. Our findings add to studies on the historical origins of public opinion as well as deservingness by showing how illegitimate wealth accumulation affects political attitudes across generations.

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Global inequality and international migration are deeply rooted in the history of European colonialism. However, the impact of this legacy on contemporary public opinion about international politics remains underexplored. Drawing on studies of intergroup hostility, I argue that exposing descendants of perpetrator groups to information about past transgressions, such as violent and exploitative colonization, can induce defensiveness and increase outgroup bias. This argument is supported by attitudinal and behavioral evidence from a representative survey experiment (n=1,680) in Germany—a country only beginning to grapple with its colonial past. The findings demonstrate that raising awareness of historical intergroup hostilities can, under certain circumstances, produce a backlash rather than facilitate reconciliation.

Political and economic elites often warn that taxes on the rich impair economic growth. Although such warnings have a long tradition in elite discourse and election campaigns, what the public believes about the effects of progressive taxation remains surprisingly understudied. This omission limits our understanding of a basic democratic mechanism, the congruence of elite and mass opinion. To close this gap, we employ a conjoint experiment during the last German national election on a representative quota sample. Participants compare policy packages that entail changes in income, inheritance, and corporate taxes  and evaluate their impact on equality and growth. We find no evidence that the public believes in a trade-off between equality and growth. Instead participants believe that both go hand in hand, particularly for income and wealth taxation. Furthermore, such beliefs do not vary by ideology or economic status. Our findings may help to shape a more consensual approach to progressive taxation that emphasizes positive synergies between economic growth and greater equality.

[PREREGISTRATION]

This paper delves into the intricacies of public opinion formation by examining how citizens justify their support for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) during the nascent stages of policy discussion. As advanced democracies grapple with economic uncertainties, understanding how citizens express and justify their support for income-securing policies like Basic Universal Income is paramount. While prior studies focus on the determinants of UBI support, we argue that it is important to identify where UBI proponents and opponents agree and where they disagree. Leveraging a unique empirical context, a public initiative aiming to introduce a UBI in the German State Hamburg, we approach polarization from two angles. First, we study what elements of the policy design are at the root of disagreements over UBI. We extend the commonly used conjoint design to study preference heterogeneity, and in particular the divergent support of UBI proponents and opponents. Second, we explore how proponents and opponents of UBI justify their position. We use an open-ended survey question in order to avoid imposing limitations on the arguments that can be mentioned. As such, our research design allows us to understand how disagreements over UBI are rooted in divergent attitudes and arguments.

Popular support is important to the emergence and survival of democracy. In this paper we study how church-state relations in former British Africa shaped long-run support for democracy. We argue that shared national identity was the basis for incentive alignment, facilitating cooperation over educational policy between church and state and leading to long-lasting support for democracy. Employing geospatial analyses of historical missions data and contemporary social survey data from 19 former British African colonies, we find that areas with missions originating from Britain exhibit better educational outcomes and greater support for democracy than areas that had non-British missions. Furthermore, areas with British Protestant missions show greater support for democracy than British Catholic missions, suggesting that Protestantism supplements the benefits of shared nationhood between mission and state. Our findings add nuance to scholarship on the colonial origins of democracy by highlighting the interdependent legacies of church and state.

Christian missions, especially Protestants missions, have been shown to advance long-run education outcomes and gender equality in Africa. However, the mechanisms behind this benign legacy and the contribution of missionary women, who constituted more than half of all Western mission staff, are not well-understood. We compile a new extensive data set on the locations of missions in colonial Africa, including the gender composition of their staff. In combination with contemporary survey data on one million respondents in 29 African countries, we provide evidence of missions' equalizing effects with regards to education and a wide range of female agency outcomes. We document that Protestant missions left no more benign legacy than Catholics, questioning the Protestant exceptionalism highlighted by prior studies. We also document a strong association between missionary women and girls' school enrollment in colonial times but find no evidence of any lasting gendered effects. Post-independence expansion of public education and the secularization of school curricula may have offset persistence of Africa's earliest centers of female education. 

Access to education as well as health systems belong to the core development goals of the United Nations since its inception. Today, almost all countries have education and health systems in place. In former colonies, the historical roots of these systems can often be traced back to colonial times. In this paper, we argue that spending on social services for the local population was seen as a necessary condition to expand the trade-based colonial economy especially in the initial stage of social services dating back to the interwar period. Using novel data on health and education expenditure in 36 former British and French African colonies during the height of their empires (1925-36), we show that trade volumes account for a large share in the variance of expenditure on early social protection schemes. Our results suggest that similar mechanisms are at play within the two empires and differences between them are in degree rather than in kind.

Political actors frequently use historical depictions and narratives to increase support for policies and to mobilize voters. Recent studies are conflicted about the electoral consequences of inclusionary memory policy that increases the visibility of historically marginalized groups compared to majority groups. While some argue that such policies are effective in countering the rise of the radical right, others point to the risk of a political and cultural backlash. In our study we shed light on this debate by investigating the effects of an official report that recommends the renaming of streets commemorating anti-Semitic figures in Berlin. First, we collect and combine highly fine-grained data on 9 elections with geocoded infrastructure data and estimate the electoral effects of street renamings using multiple difference-in-difference techniques. Second, we conduct a pre-registered survey experiment with a quota-based sample of Berlin residents to explore the mechanisms underlying the electoral effects. We find that the street renaming initiative decreased the vote share of the center-right by one percentage point in districts were renamings have been proposed. This effect is driven by a negative emotional response, guilt, and increased support for inclusionary memory policies that moves voters away from the policy positions of right-wing parties. Our findings strongly speak against the backlash hypothesis. Instead opposition to inclusionary memory policies can move voters away from right-wing parties and decrease their electoral fortunes.