Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • Historical Persistence and Nazi Legacies in Contemporary Germany

    One of the most exciting developments in comparative politics and political economy has been renewed attention to history—specifically, to the historical foundations of contemporary politics, and how historical legacies continue to affect us today. Although few social scientists would ever have denied that “history matters,” a wealth of recent works have provided compelling quantitative evidence that features of politics from long ago predict features of politics today. I have done some of this myself, looking at how colonial migration patterns are related to to contemporary local governance patterns in Java. Other work has looked at the political legacies of slavery in the United States, the legacies of colonial land tenure policies in India, and a host of other outcomes.

    What makes such arguments so interesting is their attention to local variation in historical experiences. But linking local variation over long time scales raises difficult methodological issues. Morgan Kelly, in an important recent paper, has shown that many strong correlations between spatially-defined historical variables and spatially-defined contemporary outcomes are the product of spatial autocorrelation.

    Inspired in part by such concerns, in a new paper, Sara Wallace Goodman, Conrad Ziller, and I take a fresh look at an important recent article examining the historical legacies of the Holocaust on contemporary German attitudes. The authors find a strong and statistically significant correlation between how far Germans live from a former Nazi concentration camp and their out-group tolerance: people who live closer to former concentration camps are less tolerant than those who live further away. They also show that this distance also predicts support for the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party.

    Yet because Nazi concentration camps were not randomly assigned across space, and because neither are contemporary political attitudes, it could be that these analyzes are inadvertently picking up correlations that have nothing to do with the legacies of the institutions of mass slaughter. And indeed, we show that those results are not robust to statistical approaches that recognize the differences across contemporary German states (Länder). There is lots to dig into in this paper: German administrative divisions; Prussian reforms under Weimar; post-treatment variables, colliders, and bias-amplifiers; Hausman tests and reweighting estimators for heterogenous effects; and multi-level modeling of non-nested hierarchical structures. Our approach, we hope, will provide a template of best practices for future scholars who are interested in establishing the causal relationships between spatial historical variables and contemporary outcomes.

    Rather uniquely (we believe), this paper is both a replication and a pre-analysis plan. One of the data sources that we wish to replicate is not publicly available, so we are unable to replicate it at present. Still, we are able to specify the analyses that we plan to conduct when we do have access to those data, and will register these at OSF (these plans are currently in the Supplemental Appendix).

    You can read the paper here. And you can replicate our analysis here. Watch this space for more updates. And we wish to offer our thanks to the original authors for releasing their own replication materials, which allows us to conduct our analysis with full transparency and assurance that any errors or misunderstandings on our part can be quickly addressed.

  • Malaysian Politics Regresses to the Mean

    The past week in Malaysian politics has been nothing less than a whirlwind. It started with news that Azmin Ali had hatched a plot to unseat Malaysia’s 94 year old Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad. It ended with Muhyiddin Yassin being sworn in by the Yang di-Pertuan Agong as Prime Minister. Along the way a lot has happened: the ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition fractured, a bunch of Malay politicians jumped parties, Mahathir resigned and was appointed his own interim successor, and so much more.

    Having tried to follow all of these events that happen overnight (from the East Coast, USA perspective), I confess to playing catchup. For example, my comments for the South China Morning Post and Asia Times were out of date almost as soon as they were published. And yet the main takeaway point to understand what has happened to Malaysia doesn’t require much attention to the nitty gritty details.

    What has happened, in short, is that the pan-ethnic coalition that push the ruling Barisan Nasional [= National Front] regime out of power in 2018 has fractured. What has replaced it is the hard core of the parties that represent a Malay-first agenda: the long-time Malay nationalist party the United Malays National Organisation, the Islamist Pan-Malaysian Islamist Party, and the upstart UMNO-splinter party the Malaysian United Indigenous Party. Known as the Perikatan Nasional [= National Alliance], this coalition is the inevitable product of Malaysia’s long-running ethnic cleavage which—after fifty years—has finally seen UMNO and PAS join together in a government that no longer has even token representation of non-Malay interests (which the Barisan Nasional always maintained). Opposing Perikatan (for the moment) are parties that tend to represent non-ethnic platforms, parties from East Malaysia, and those who reject the Malay nationalist agenda more broadly.

    It is striking that Muhyiddin’s government freezes both Mahathir and Anwar—the two most important Malaysian politicians over the past half century—out of power. That said, it is only a day old so far, and the smart money is that Mahathir and Anwar are not down for the count. And elections will be due in any case in a little over three years at the longest; I had previously thought that snap elections might be on their way, but now I am not so sure that Perikatan can be confident that it would win an electoral mandate. So there is bound to be plenty to follow in the coming days. More party hopping, bluffs, and backroom deals are on their way.

    But none of these details will change the basic essence of what has happened, which Malaysian politics has regressed to the mean.