Ludwig Schulze

Ludwig Schulze studies the issue of authoritarian regime stability and specifically asks why ordinary citizens support non-democratic actors. Using modern causal inference methods in historical settings, he scrutinizes the conditions under which ordinary citizens invest in authoritarian regimes and, conversely, how these regimes strategically try to control citizens. His major project focuses on the stability of the German Democratic Republic and seeks to understand how former fascists were transformed into supportive communists. The main conclusion of this work underlines how top-down control strategies and bottom-up citizen agency jointly shape the survival of undemocratic regimes. Other strands of his research zoom in on the legacies that communist and fascist regimes have left behind in Germany. In that context, he studies the consequences and limits of memory politics and under what conditions they can provide guardrails against the renewal of non-democratic actors today.