War and Nationalism: How WW1 battle deaths fueled civilians’ support for the Nazi Party

Abstract

Did indirect community-level exposure to WW1 casualties facilitate the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany? Mass warfare can promote nationalist attitudes outside of active combat zones by amplifying in-group preferences of returning veterans and relatives affected by traumatic loss. We investigate such localized effects of WW1 on interwar Germany. We combine data on the birthplaces of over 7.5 million war casualties with county-level election results, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in death rates for causal identification. We document a robust and substantial positive effect of indirect war exposure on the Nazi vote share. Analyses of party entries, the role of war monuments, and Nazi autobiographies suggest that war losses foster a stronger in-group orientation of highly war affected communities. These findings advance our understanding of the local impact of WW1 on the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the longer-term legacies of indirect exposure to violence on preferences for nationalist ideologies.

War-Time Military Service Can Affect Partisan Preferences

“…However, like any empirical study, future research should establish the generalizability of our findings in additional countries and wars (McDermott, 2011). In doing so, scholars might focus on contemporary instances of war such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq (Karol & Miguel, 2007), or historical instances of conflict such as World War I (Cagé et al, 2021;De Juan et al, 2021), and examine different mechanisms through which participation in war shapes political preferences and behaviors. We especially encourage scholars to build on our theoretical framework and empirical set up to further develop and systematically test the conditions under which participation in war might have positive, negative, or null effects on support for incumbent parties and leaders.…”

Homeward Bound: How Migrants Seek Out Familiar Climates

“…The lists allow us to infer the geographic distribution of German surnames around the time of WWI. We acknowledge that the lists are only partially representative of the German population, most notably because the draft was not uniform across the Empire (De Juan et al, 2021). However, the lists represent a rare source of information on the geographic distribution of the population in a country that experienced mass migration to the US at the turn of the 20 th century.…”

Does War Foster Cooperation or Parochialism? Evidence from a Natural Experiment Among Turkish Conscripts

“…In particular, using different identification strategies, several studies show evidence that war exposure leads to increased civic engagement, political participation, collective action, trustworthiness, interpersonal trust, and generosity and inequality aversion towards ingroup members (Bellows and Miguel, 2009;Blattman, 2009;Voors et al, 2012;Gilligan et al, 2014;Bauer et al, 2014, Bauer et al, 2016, Bauer et al, 2018Jha and Wilkinson, 2012). 1 On the other hand, there is the observed persistence of conflicts and their tendency to recur, and the argument that this pattern can be explained by parochial responses to war exposure, such as increased nationalism, polarization, loss of trust, and reduced prosociality towards out-group members, likely triggered by psychological reactions to war trauma and the associated grievances (Henrich, 2020;Collier et al, 2003;Rohner et al, 2013a, b;Grossman et al, 2015;Hager et al, 2019;Conzo and Salustri, 2019;De Juan et al, 2022;Vlachos, 2022). 2 This seeming contrast stems from the challenges in identifying and isolating the complex psychological, economic, and social mechanisms, linking war exposure to subsequent political and societal attitudes and behaviors and the effects they transmit (Blattman and Bauer, 2010;Bauer et al, 2016;Cederman and Vogt, 2017;Couttenier et al, 2019).…”