Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Cologne. I study (historical) political economy with a focus on voting behavior, redistribution, and fiscal policy.
Publications
Austerity and Social Spending: Estimating the Long-Run Effects of Fiscal Adjustment
Nils Blossey
British Journal of Political Science, 2025; 55:e107.
doi:10.1017/S0007123425000018
Abstract
Ageing populations and slower growth have compelled governments in mature welfare states to implement fiscal adjustments, but uncertainty persists about whether these measures have successfully curtailed the size of the welfare state. This letter documents that fiscal adjustments reduce social spending more effectively than previously thought. Using data from sixteen advanced economies between 1978 and 2018 and the narrative identification of adjustment plans, I estimate cumulative multipliers with local projections. I find that fiscal adjustments persistently lower social spending, including key components of social consumption and social investment. To explain why austerity does not shelter the welfare state, I present stylized facts about the timing and composition of adjustment plans. First, while public investment cuts concentrate at the beginning of the adjustment period, social consumption cuts accumulate over time. Second, large budget deficits and financial crises are frequent antecedents of the most ambitious fiscal reforms.Projects
From Wealth to Welfare: How Economic Elites Made Inequality Work
Accepted at Comparative Political Studies
📄 Paper
Abstract
Why do advanced economies engage in substantial income transfers but scarcely redistribute wealth? This paper argues that wealth inequality historically led economic elites to expand income transfers to propertyless households to stabilize the unequal property order. I study this proposition in the context of landholding inequality in Prussia. Estate owners, I argue, used income transfers to offset the economic insecurities of landless workers who could not rely on landownership as insurance against income loss. I digitize surveys of local poor relief and exploit Prussia's administrative structure, where estates functioned as independent local authorities. The results show that landholding inequality caused higher income transfers to the poor, driven by the redistributive actions of estate owners. Estate owners allocated relief as social protection over the life cycle for households outside of the active workforce. This commitment to insurance was associated with greater voter support for the conservative parties representing estate owners' interests.Coal Rush: The Built Legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the Radical Right
with Lukas Haffert, Lukas F. Stoetzer
Accepted at American Journal of Political Science
📄 Working Paper
Abstract
Historical industrial centers have shifted to the right but have done so at different speeds and intensities. We argue that this variation can be explained by differences in the historical industrialization process. Places that industrialized later and more intensively realign more toward the radical right today. This is because the built environment created by the original industrialization drives demographic persistence and neighborhood disadvantage. To examine our argument, we study the effects of nineteenth-century coal mining in Germany's Ruhr area. We match the geolocation of over 1,000 mining shafts, historical mine-level employment data, and the spread of company housing with contemporary electoral results at the city-district level. For identification, we exploit the depth of coal deposits that governed the adoption of deep-shaft mining in an instrumental variables design. The findings demonstrate how the path of economic development influences voting in the long run.Not in My Basement: The Political Costs of Climate Reforms
with Michael M. Bechtel, Paul Michel 📄 Working Paper
Abstract
Climate action provokes voter opposition when it imposes concentrated and easily identifiable costs, but reforms often expose households to uncertain rather than known financial burdens. We argue that this uncertainty allows individuals to develop subjective cost expectations and narratives, generating widespread opposition that extends beyond those most directly exposed. We study these dynamics in the context of Germany’s 2023 heating law, a large-scale reform to decarbonize the housing sector. We combine AI-assisted qualitative interviews and open-ended survey responses from 2,377 respondents with two experiments to explore the drivers of reform opposition. We show that opposition is prevalent and linked to subjective cost perceptions and anti-reform narratives emphasizing rising energy prices and government overreach. Subjective cost perceptions are only weakly tied to actual heating conditions and vary systematically with partisan identity. Even major policy redesigns fail to generate majority support. These results advance our understanding of when large-scale climate reforms fail.Diversity and Socialism: Evidence from the Ruhr Diaspora
with Lukas Haffert, Lukas F. Stoetzer
Abstract
Mass socialist parties emerged in every industrialized country of the nineteenth century except the United States, a pattern often attributed to immigration and ethnic diversity. We study the dynamics of industrialization, migration, and voting in Europe's largest industrial region of the late nineteenth century, the German Ruhr Valley, where the expansion of coal mining triggered large-scale, ethnically incongruent migration from Prussia's eastern provinces. We digitize electoral returns from historical polling stations between 1890 and 1912 and link them to mine-level insurance records on workers' migrant origins. Using staggered difference-in-differences and an instrumental variables design, which exploits the northward relocation of mining driven by the uneven depth of coal seams, we show that industrialization increased support for socialism, with larger gains in mining areas that experienced greater eastern migration. However, where migrants arrived with a Polish national identity, industrialization instead produced an ethnically segmented labor movement. Our findings show that socialism could mobilize across ethnic lines, yet remained fundamentally constrained by the rise of ethnic nationalism.Inner Mission, Outward Conquest: The Religious Coproduction of the Welfare State
Abstract
States and religious organizations have often been conceived as competitors in the provision of welfare transfers and social services. I argue instead that they could share powerful incentives to engage in welfare state coproduction in the era of nineteenth-century state-building. States could collaborate with religious organizations to leverage their coordinative capacity in service delivery, while religious organizations could access the state's extractive capacity to scale their services while retaining the religious surplus. I examine this argument in Germany, where the nineteenth-century expansion of public redistribution coincided with the rise of evangelical welfare organizations. Empirically, I first study whether the preindustrial spread of ecclesiastical charitable activity predicts the subsequent expansion of public welfare, consistent with the incorporation of religious welfare capacity into emerging state provision. I then examine the nineteenth-century expansion of religious charitable activity outside established church structures through independent evangelical charities. Using a difference-in-differences design across Prussian cities between 1849 and 1911, and cross-sectional evidence from German counties in the late Weimar Republic, I test whether the expansion of independent religious charity facilitated the scaling of public social transfers. Lastly, I examine whether the legacy of confessional welfare institutions, now an institutionalized pillar of the German welfare state, shapes the scale and capacity of social services and welfare provision today.Household Responses to Fiscal News Shocks
with Adrian Schröder 📄 Working Paper
Abstract
We study the impact of fiscal news shocks on household consumption and economic expectations through two survey experiments conducted in the United States. To causally identify the effect of a news shock, we first implement an information provision experiment in which respondents receive varying information about the projected growth rate of real federal government spending for the upcoming year. Second, we employ a vignette experiment that allows respondents to revise their macroeconomic expectations in response to a hypothetical government spending increase with different components. Our findings show that while households initially adjust their fiscal expectations in response to the news shock, these updates are not persistent over time. The fiscal news shock significantly raises inflation expectations in the short run but has no measurable effect on personal household consumption. Additional evidence from the vignette experiment and respondents' mental models of fiscal expansions consistently shows that households predominantly perceive fiscal interventions as inflationary.Hidden Champions
with Paul Michel, Jasmin Rath, and Jens Wäckerle