Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler

Abstract

The enormous Nazi voting literature rarely builds on modern statistical or economic research. By adding these approaches, we find that the most widely accepted existing theories of this era cannot distinguish the Weimar elections from almost any others in any country. Via a retrospective voting account, we show that voters most hurt by the depression, and most likely to oppose the government, fall into separate groups with divergent interests. This explains why some turned to the Nazis and others turned away. The consequences of Hitler's election were extraordinary, but the voting behavior that led to it was not.

Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany

“…34 Other authors attribute the relative strength of the NSDAP in Protestant areas to its weakness in proposing policies that could have appealed to farmers in Southern (Catholic) areas (King et al 2008). Table 6).…”

Abbott's Gambit: The 2013 Australian Federal Election

“…Journalistic analyses of regional divergences in Australian politics frequently cite the variant levels of party support in different states as evidence of 'regionalism' (Colebatch 2013a Democratic politics is mostly about a competition by parties to provide voters with the same public goods, even if voters disagree about which goods to prioritise and their evaluation of the competence of different parties to provide them (King et al 2008). The uniformity of political behaviour in Australia exemplifies this principle.…”

Voting Behaviour and Public Employment in Nazi Germany

“…While I control for city xed eects and time-varying eects of several control variables, the National Socialist vote share is still a potentially endogenous varibale: Several previous studies (most recently King et al 2008) have highlighted the importance of the post-1929 economic crisis for the NSDAP's electoral results. Dierential impacts of the economic crisis would likely lead to dierences in public employment and also be correlated with the 1933 Nazi vote share.…”