PhD Defence by Ludwig Schulze
Authoritarian regimes survive not only through repression and elite manipulation, but also because ordinary citizens find reasons to support them. This dissertation investigates the microfoundations of authoritarian stability, asking how the material interests of autocrats and citizens converge to sustain undemocratic rule. Drawing on the German Democratic Republic as a historical laboratory, it applies causal inference methods to novel fine-grained historical data across three single-authored chapters.
The first chapter challenges the standard portrait of authoritarian armies as purely extractive. When soldiers depend on local communities for goods and services, cooperation can replace predation. Soviet troops stationed in East Germany, deployed far from home with modest pay, engaged in informal trade with locals and improved material conditions in their host communities. Conversely, GDR troops, who did not face the same dependence, proved to be extractive and worsened local housing conditions. These economic spillovers proved politically durable: former Soviet host communities remain more pro-Russian and less supportive of democratic institutions decades after reunification.
The second chapter turns to the question of how regimes consolidate power before coercive institutions are fully in place. Rather than relying predominantly on repression, the East German communist leadership used a comprehensive land reform to convert opposition strongholds. The reform raised SED vote shares in the 1946 elections by up to 18 percent, but only in traditionally anti-communist areas. It is in these places where material benefits made former opposition voters understand that they would profit from communist rule.
The third chapter examines why citizens invest in a new regime under uncertainty. After all, why would citizens join an undemocratic regime when it is far from clear that it will survive long enough for them to reap the benefits? This chapter argues that young authoritarian regimes can signal their strength to citizens, raising their beliefs that the regime will survive. Using the comprehensive land reform as such a signal of strength, it displays how young farmers in land-reform municipalities were significantly more likely to join the party, study ideologically aligned subjects and reach higher nomenklatura ranks. This suggests genuine commitment rather than passive compliance. Taken together, the three chapters reframe authoritarian stability as a function of joint interest, in which separate actors each find material reasons to keep the regime alive. Authoritarian governance is therefore a function of top-down as well as bottom-up strategies.
Ludwig Schulze is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute under the supervision of Elias Dinas. Grounded in Historical Political Economy, Ludwig studies the political economy of authoritarian regime support. Ludwig spent parts of his PhD as visiting scholar at the London School of Economics and New York University. In September 2026, Ludwig will join Sciences Po Paris as a Postdoctoral Research Associate.
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