Examining a Most Likely Case for Strong Campaign Effects: Hitler’s Speeches and the Rise of the Nazi Party, 1927–1933

Abstract

Hitler’s rise to power amidst an unprecedented propaganda campaign initiated scholarly interest in campaign effects. To the surprise of many, empirical studies often found minimal effects. The predominant focus of early work was on U.S. elections, though. Nazi propaganda as the archetypal and, in many ways, most likely case for strong effects has rarely been studied. We collect extensive data about Hitler’s speeches and gauge their impact on voter support at five national elections preceding the dictatorship. We use a semi-parametric difference-in-differences approach to estimate effects in the face of potential confounding due to the deliberate scheduling of events. Our findings suggest that Hitler’s speeches, while rationally targeted, had a negligible impact on the Nazis’ electoral fortunes. Only the 1932 presidential runoff, an election preceded by an extraordinarily short, intense, and one-sided campaign, yielded positive effects. This study questions the importance of charismatic leaders for the success of populist movements.

Natural experiments in leadership research: An introduction, review, and guidelines

“…Unfortunately, there is currently no clear solution to SUTVA violations, though Belloc et al (2018) used corrected standard errors to deal with such possible violations, and Selb and Munzert (2018) excluded units in the control group which were in close spatial proximity to treated units, because these units were particularly likely to be treated by accident.…”

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

“…33 We use the same set of control variables as in our main analysis. The geographic data to compute them are obtained from Selb and Munzert (2018). 34…”

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

“…We use the same set of control variables as in our main analysis. The geographic data to compute them are obtained from Selb and Munzert (2018 In addition to our primary analysis, we add a secondary set of empirical tests focused on changes in participative institutions at the town level between 1300 to 1500. These analyses are meant to evaluate empirical support for the political transmission mechanisms outlined in our theory.…”

“…For the analysis of 1930 election results, we use town-and city-level observations as they represent the most fine-grained data available to us. For the analysis of July 1932 election results, we are restricted to the county level as no official city/town-level election data was disseminated at the time(Selb and Munzert, 2018).…”