This paper develops a transparent and reproducible LLM-based workflow for turning dense historical print sources into structured data, and demonstrates it by digitizing Hermann A. L. Degener’s Wer Ist’s? (1911). The source contains roughly 16,000 biographies spread across about 1,900 pages and is challenging due to dense typography, non-standard abbreviations, and frequent minor errors. The workflow has modular steps that are divided into small tasks, which also involve humans for verification. These modular steps include image pre-processing and OCR, biography assembly with sanity checks, variable identification, field extraction, validation, and normalization that expands abbreviations while flagging uncertainty. The workflow is also transparent; prompts, logs, model responses, and outputs link each biography back to the original source.

Why did the Weimar democracy collapse, while the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) achieved political stability? One key difference was the role of confessional politics and its impact on party fragmentation and support for the extreme right. This paper revisits the effect of denominational divisions on electoral outcomes in Weimar Germany and postwar West Germany. Catholic-Protestant divisions shaped political fragmentation on the center-right and influenced the rise of right-wing extremism, from the NSDAP’s electoral breakthrough in the early 1930s to the NPD’s emergence in the late 1960s. We leverage historical variation in confessional composition, which was created by the territorial fragmentation of Southwest Germany and the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, as established by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. By comparing adjacent Catholic and Protestant parishes, we find robust evidence that political fragmentation is lowest in all-Catholic parishes and highest in parishes with a significant Catholic minority. At the same time, higher Catholic population shares significantly reduced Nazi vote shares in 1932. Turning to the postwar period, we demonstrate that the formation of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as an interdenominational Volkspartei altered these dynamics. Although Catholics continued to vote disproportionately for the CDU, Protestant areas remained more susceptible to far-right mobilization following the rise of the right-wing NPD in the late 1960s. Finally, we use individual-level survey data to shed light on the mechanisms through which religion affects voting behavior. We demonstrate that Protestants and Catholics had similar underlying political preferences. Rather, the key distinction lay in attachment to the church and the churches’ perceived political stance: the Catholic Church was widely seen as staunchly supporting the CDU and opposing the NPD. Followers who placed high importance on the church aligned their voting choices accordingly, refraining from supporting the far-right despite holding nationalistic political convictions similar to others’. Our findings support the argument that Catholicism primarily influenced voting behavior through the clergy.

The fertility decline in industrializing Europe marks a turning point in human history, and there is ongoing debate about its causes and their relative importance. This paper examines the impact of Protestantism on fertility decline in the southwestern German Kingdom of Württemberg, 1871-1930. Using data on the universe of 1,764 localities, we provide the first large-scale descriptive evidence on the timing of fertility decline at the parish level for Germany. We find that there is as much heterogeneity in the timing of fertility decline within Württemberg as there is across districts in Europe. To provide causal evidence on the effect of religion on the timing of the fertility decline, we exploit that religion was determined by decisions of local rulers in the 16th century, decisions that are arguably exogenous to fertility decisions of people in the 19th and 20th centuries. Furthermore, we show that neighboring parishes do not differ in economic, geographic, or institutional characteristics other than religion. Our results indicate that Protestant parishes experienced the onset of fertility decline significantly earlier than Catholic parishes, by about ten years. We hypothesize that an interaction between religious norms, secularization, and differential responses to changes in infant mortality drives the results and provide preliminary evidence for this notion.