The Nazi Party membership dataset
Holger L. Kern and Georg Vanberg
Journal of Law and CourtsHolger L. Kern
Associate Professor of Political Science at Florida State University
Areas of inquiry
Authoritarian
regimesTransitional
justicePolitical
methodology
regimesTransitional
justicePolitical
methodology
Comparative Politics — Causal Inference
About
I study the politics of authoritarian regimes, democratization and democratic backsliding, and transitional justice, with a particular focus on the German dictatorships of the twentieth century. In addition to my substantive research, I have also published a number of articles on causal inference in randomized experiments and observational studies.
Photo credits
Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate, 1961: Bundesarchiv, Bild 145-P061246 / o.Ang. / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Source.
June 17, 1953 uprising: Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F005191-0040 / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. Source.
With Quintin Beazer, I organize the Virtual Workshop on Authoritarian Regimes (VWAR) and a yearly conference-within-a-conference on “The Politics of Authoritarian Regimes” during the SPSA annual meeting.
Research
Working paper · 2026
Transitional justice and bureaucratic oversight: Prosecuting Nazi crimes in West Germany
With Georg Vanberg · Revise & resubmit, British Journal of Political Science
Work in progress
Authoritarian entanglements and bureaucratic careers after transition to democracy: Evidence from post-war West Germany
With Georg Vanberg
Work in progress
The effects of Stalin’s purges on present-day responses to autocratic coercion: Observational and experimental evidence from Russia
With Quintin Beazer and Noah Buckley
Work in progress
The long-term effects of censorship on the dissemination of knowledge: Evidence from Nazi Germany’s book bans
With Quintin Beazer
Work in progress
Nazi-era judges and judicial decision-making in Germany’s Federal Court of Justice
With Georg Vanberg
Publications
Public support for patriotic education under authoritarianism: Evidence from Russia
Katerina Tertytchnaya, Quintin Beazer, Olga Gasparyan, Holger L. Kern, Eugenia Nazrullaeva, and Ksenia Northmore-Ball
Journal of Experimental Political ScienceTransitional justice and the rule of law: Tainted judges and accountability for Nazi crimes in West Germany
Holger L. Kern and Georg Vanberg
Journal of Politics 86 (4): 1333–1347When do private actors engage in censorship? Evidence from a correspondence experiment with Russian private media firms
Quintin H. Beazer, Charles D. Crabtree, Christopher J. Fariss, and Holger L. Kern
British Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 1790–1809Sponsorship effects in online surveys
Charles Crabtree, Holger L. Kern, and Matthew Pietryka
Political Behavior 44 (1): 257–270Do street-level bureaucrats discriminate based on religion? A large-scale correspondence experiment among American public school principals
Steven Pfaff, Charles Crabtree, Holger L. Kern, and John B. Holbein
Public Administration Review 81 (2): 244–259Cults of personality, preference falsification, and the dictator’s dilemma
Charles Crabtree, Holger L. Kern, and David A. Siegel
Journal of Theoretical Politics 32 (3): 409–434Using electromagnetic signal propagation models for radio and television broadcasts: An introduction
Charles Crabtree and Holger L. Kern
Political Analysis 26 (3): 348–355Mass media and the diffusion of collective action in authoritarian regimes: The June 1953 East German uprising
Charles Crabtree, Holger L. Kern, and Steven Pfaff
International Studies Quarterly 62 (2): 301–314Combining double sampling and bounds to address non-ignorable missing outcomes in randomized experiments
Alex Coppock, Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Holger L. Kern
Political Analysis 25 (2): 188–206Assessing methods for generalizing experimental impact estimates to target samples
Holger L. Kern, Elizabeth A. Stuart, Jennifer Hill, and Donald P. Green
Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness 9 (1): 103–127A spatial analysis of the impact of West German television on protest mobilization during the East German revolution
Charles Crabtree, David Darmofal, and Holger L. Kern
Journal of Peace Research 52 (3): 269–284Modeling heterogeneous treatment effects in survey experiments with Bayesian Additive Regression Trees
Donald P. Green and Holger L. Kern
Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (3): 491–511Foreign media and protest diffusion in authoritarian regimes: The case of the 1989 East German revolution
Holger Lutz Kern
Comparative Political Studies 44 (9): 1179–1205Baseline, placebo, and treatment: Efficient estimation for three-group experiments
Alan Gerber, Donald Green, Edward H. Kaplan, and Holger L. Kern
Political Analysis 18 (3): 297–315The political consequences of transitions out of marriage in Great Britain
Holger Lutz Kern
Electoral Studies 29 (2): 249–258Testing the accuracy of regression discontinuity analysis using experimental benchmarks
Donald P. Green, Terence Y. Leong, Holger L. Kern, Alan S. Gerber, and Christopher W. Larimer
Political Analysis 17 (4): 400–417Opium for the masses: How foreign media can stabilize authoritarian regimes
Holger Lutz Kern and Jens Hainmueller
Political Analysis 17 (4): 377–399Incumbency as a source of spillover effects in mixed electoral systems: Evidence from a regression-discontinuity design
Jens Hainmueller and Holger Lutz Kern
Electoral Studies 27 (2): 213–227Electoral balancing, divided government and ‘midterm’ loss in German elections
Holger Lutz Kern and Jens Hainmueller
Journal of Legislative Studies 12 (2): 127–149Strategies of legal change: Great Britain, international law, and the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade
Holger Lutz Kern
Journal of the History of International Law 6 (2): 233–258NSDAP data
In a paper forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Courts, Georg Vanberg and I introduce a dataset of all surviving Nazi party membership cards that we constructed by digitizing more than 16 million pages of Nazi party membership records recently released by the U.S. National Archives.
Paper | Datasets in R format | Datasets in Stata format
Source
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group 242, NSDAP membership records, Microfilm Publication A3340.
We are currently also compiling a list of SS officers and enlisted members.
Source
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Record Group 242, SS personnel records.
Contact