Project description
How shocks affect elite's economic and political power
New democracies often inherit entrenched political and economic elites who wield significant influence over policymaking. The ERC-funded ENTRENCHED project will investigate how major shocks impact these elites and whether such moments reshape their power. This research is crucial for understanding social mobility and elite persistence, contributing to debates in economics and political science. Focusing on 19th-century Prussia (where the landed nobility held substantial authority), the project will examine how this elite adapted to key 20th-century disruptions, including revolutions and world wars. By constructing a dataset of approximately 22 000 large, landed estates from 1871 to 1945, the project expects to provide new insights into the dynamics of elite influence and mobility.
Objective
New democracies often inherit entrenched political or economic elites who retain substantial influence over policymaking. This project studies a number of systematic and idiosyncratic shocks to such elites and examines whether these critical junctures affect the persistence and decline of their economic and political power. It is pertinent to economists and political scientists and contributes to ongoing debates regarding social mobility and elite capture.
I propose to study these topics within the historical context of Prussia, where the landed nobility formed an entrenched elite wielding enormous power throughout the 19th century. In the 20th century, they faced substantial economic and political disruptions (disempowerment in a revolution, death in two world wars, and displacement from their estates), yet arguably remained highly influential.
I will create a novel panel dataset, digitized from primary and secondary sources, documenting ownership and size of the universe of ca. 22,000 large landed estates from 1871 to 1945. This core dataset will be augmented with individual-level data on incumbents in various non-elected offices in the public administration and archival data on social ties among the elite. In combination, these data enable the analysis of the social mobility and political influence of the landed elite with unprecedented detail, using institutional and idiosyncratic shocks to the elite for causal inference.
WP1 (disempowerment) studies the impact of democratic transitions, which entail a de facto decline in the political value of land ownership, on the social mobility and political power of the elite. WP 2 (death) studies how individual shocks—the death of a family member in military service—affect the social mobility and ability to shape the political process of the elite. WP3 (displacement) studies the role of social ties in the elite's social mobility and potential elite capture post-WWII, following their forced relocation to West Germany.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
This project's classification has been validated by the project's team.
Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
50931 KOLN
Germany
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