Julian Voß
Julian Voß is a Research Fellow at the Department of Political Institutions and Conflict at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science. His research interests lie at the intersection of comparative political behavior and historical political economy. His work examines political attitudes and behavior in the context of contention, political violence, and autocratic politics. Methodologically, he focuses on causal inference using observational data, innovative data collection, and survey experiments.
Project: Social and Political Legacies of Post-War Deprivation. This project examines the behavioral and attitudinal consequences of war-related deprivation by studying the effects exceptionally harsh European winter of 1946/47 — one of the coldest winters of the 20th century, causing extreme hardship and millions of excess civilian deaths across Europe, by some estimates. It uses spatial variation in weather severity, measured through historical weather station data, to capture differences in civilians’ exposure to deprivation during the immediate post-war period. The project conducts two complementary analyses. First, it links historical information on weather severity within Germany to individual-level data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Second, it extends the analysis across Europe using data from the European Values Study (EVS). Both analyses examine whether exposure to post-war deprivation had persistent effects on social cohesion, interpersonal trust, and political attitudes. In doing so, the project seeks to shed light on how deprivation associated with war and its aftermath can shape attitudes and behavior decades later.
Project: Regime Loyalty during Wartime: Evidence from Nazi Germany. This project develops a novel behavioral measure of regime loyalty in Nazi Germany based on subtle expressions of allegiance in soldier obituaries published between 1939 and 1945. It addresses the challenge of measuring regime support in closed autocracies, where preference falsification, state censorship, and pervasive propaganda make conventional measures of public opinion unreliable. The project draws on a large-scale dataset of over one million scanned pages from roughly 160,000 newspaper issues across 260 unique local news outlets. Using Large Language Models for OCR and data labeling, it identifies expressions of regime support, such as praise for Hitler, National Socialism, or the Fatherland, in approximately 600,000 obituaries. This approach provides the first spatially and temporally granular measure of Nazi regime support during World War II. The project is joint work with Alexander De Juan (Osnabrück University), Felix Hass (Humboldt University), and Sascha Riaz (Singapore Management University).
Project: The Electoral Effects of Anti-Authoritarian Protest: Evidence from the West German Student Movement. This project studies how anti-authoritarian protest movements shape electoral behavior by studying the West German student movement of the 1960s. It addresses a recurring concern that mobilization against democratic erosion and illiberal political actors may alienate moderates and generate electoral backlash. To examine the effects of protest mobilization at the local level, the project combines city-level elections results, protest event data, and a geo-located pre-election survey. The findings show that anti-authoritarian mobilization increased support for the center left rather than generating electoral backlash.
- 2026 – Central Research Pool, Osnabrück University (€ 14,200)
- 2023 – Travel Grant, German Academic Exchange Service (€ 1,863)
- 2023 – Oxford Spring School Bursary (£ 400)
- 2023 – PolMeth Europe Bursary (£ 200)
- 2026 (Expected) – PhD, Political Science, Osnabrück University
- 2021 – M.A., Political Science, Osnabrück University
- 2019 – B.A., Political Science and Economics, Osnabrück University
- Personal Website: https://julian-voss.github.io/
- Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=d0y4eggAAAAJ&hl=en
Publications
Last Updated – August 2026