Browsing by Author "Miller, Charles"

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    Ideas and Combat Motivation: Propaganda and German Soldiers' Performance in World War II
    (Cambridge University Press, 2019-06-09) Barber, Benjamin; Miller, Charles; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
    What explains combat motivation in warfare? Scholars argue that monitoring, material rewards, and punishment alone are insufficient explanations. Further, competing ideological accounts of motivation are also problematic because ideas are difficult to operationalize and measure. To solve this puzzle, the authors combine extensive information from World War II about German soldiers’ combat performance with data about conditionally exogenous potential exposure to Nazi radio propaganda. They find evidence that soldiers with higher potential exposure to propaganda were more likely to be decorated for valor even after controlling for individual socioeconomic factors, home district characteristics like urbanization, and proxies for combat exposure.
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    Indoctrination and coercion in agent motivation: Evidence from Nazi Germany
    (Sage Journals, 2018-02-09) Miller, Charles; Barber, Benjamin; Bakar, Shuvo; https://ror.org/02jjdwm75
    How do principals combine indoctrination and coercion to motivate their agents? Based on previous literature, we argue that indoctrination on the one hand and coercion on the other are substitutes in agent motivation—more of one requires less of the other. But measuring this substitution effect is hard since individuals often self-select into ideological organizations and have incentives to claim insincerely to be ideologically motivated. Using a novel dataset of wartime behavior contained in a large sample of World War II German service records, we present a solution to these problems. We find convincing evidence to support our theory—the German army was able to induce similar effort levels from soldiers who had and had not been in the Hitler Youth, though Hitler Youth alumni required fewer punishments.