A Cursed Inheritance: Autocratic Bureaucrats and Democratic Breakdown in Weimar Germany

New democracies often inherit state institutions and key bureaucratic personnel from past autocratic regimes. How does this legacy influence democratic development? This paper studies the effect of personnel replacement among police leadership in the state of Prussia on political life in the Weimar Republic, drawing on original career data on police officers as well as electoral records. Exploiting variation in the timing of replacement in a staggered difference-in-differences design, I show that sidelining bureaucrats associated with the autocratic regime reduced mobilization effort and electoral success of anti-democratic actors, and lowered the risk of political violence. Qualitative evidence details how autocratic police leaders leveraged their authority to facilitate violent, antidemocratic mobilization. My paper highlights the importance of bureaucratic reform in shaping trajectories of democratization.