Who drives social change--the people or activist elites? While progressive reforms are often championed by elites, their preferences may diverge from those of the broader group they aim to represent, producing unintended political consequences. We study this dynamic in the context of female suffrage in Germany, a reform driven by activist elites but ultimately lacking support from the broader female electorate. Using newly digitized voting data from Munich, linked to individual socioeconomic records, we identify the political preferences of elite and non-elite women. We exploit variation in elite composition based on pre-franchise socioeconomic characteristics, as well as variation in World War I widowhood, which increased the observability of non-elite women in household records. Precincts with more elite women supported the social-liberal party that had long advocated women’s rights, while those with greater non-elite female presence shifted toward nationalist parties promoting traditional gender norms. This divergence persists across multiple elections and is not explained by warrelated shocks or male voting behavior. Our findings suggest that formal inclusion alone may be insufficient to shift entrenched social and political hierarchies.

What is the political legacy of state repression? Using local variation in state repression during the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, we investigate the effects of repression on political beliefs and behavior. We find that past state repression decreases votes for an authoritarian incumbent while enhancing electoral competition and support for democratic values four decades later. At the same time, individuals become more cautious in their interactions with the local community: they exhibit less trust, participate less in community organizations, and engage less with local government. Our theoretical model suggests that these opposing forces arise because experiencing repression bolsters preferences for pluralism while also heightening the perceived cost of dissent. Consequently, citizens are more likely to support the opposition in elections (voice) but engage less in civil society (exit) to avoid publicly revealing their political views. Exploring channels of persistence, we demonstrate that repression cultivates a lasting fear of violence as a societal threat, and that genocide memorials and remembrance ceremonies maintain the collective memory of the atrocities.

Research has shown that the type of information conveyed by media shapes the political process. However, these studies have not isolated the relative effect of local versus national content while holding the quantity of information constant, leaving the relative importance of these types of information underexplored. We document this relative importance in the context of Canada, where competition in television markets was suppressed until 1958---Canadians received either public (national) or private (local) content, but not both. We find that local media increases voter turnout and enhances electoral competition, thereby strengthening re-election incentives of incumbents. In contrast, national content has the opposite effect, underscoring the relevance of local information to voters. A text analysis of Parliamentary debates supports these results: politicians in local television districts exhibit greater responsiveness and accountability to constituents than their counterparts in national television districts. These findings demonstrate that the geographic scope of media content explains the direction of change in the behavior of voters and politicians.

This note represents a progress report on the digitization of city directories in Munich, 1845–1914. With information on names, occupations, and residential locations, directories provide a valuable source of microdata especially in a context where individual-level census records did not survive. We construct linked, complete-count data of over one million household- years based on 15 directories. Additionally, we precisely geolocate all historical addresses, drawing on a wide range of supplementary data. We discuss the construction of this dataset and present a novel approach to classify occupational standing based on the noun components of occupation titles. Finally, we show a series of descriptive findings on city growth, spatial inequality and social mobility that shed light on city development in one of the largest and fastest-growing, industrializing urban centers of Central Europe during the 19th and early 20th centuries. We view our approach as a pilot study towards the use of city directories as a source of rich individual-level microdata to study the economic and social history of cities.