War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration

Abstract

This paper combines two independent working papers, "War, Socialism and the Rise of Fascism: An Empirical Exploration" by Acemoglu, De Feo and De Luca and "World War One and the Rise of Fascism in Italy" by Russo. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

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

“…Moreover, our findings complement a significant body of econometric micro-level research that focused largely on the role of socioeconomic factors and propaganda to the rise of the NSDAP (Adena et al 2015;King et al 2008;. Importantly, our article complements a set of recent empirical working papers assessing the impact of WW1 on voting in Italy (Acemoglu et al 2020) and fascist preferences in France (Cagé et al 2020). Specifically for the case of Germany, our findings complement previous work that highlights the impact of veterans on electoral dynamics in Weimar.…”

“…This finding rules out an important alternative explanation that has been proposed in the context of WW1's impact on the rise of fascism in Italy. Acemoglu et al (2020) demonstrate that in Italy, the electoral impact of WW1 casualties is associated with an increase in the socialist vote share, resulting in a nationalist backlash out of fear of a socialist revolution. Given that we observe the opposite effect in the German case, it is unlikely that the same mechanism is at work.…”

“…Recently, studies have started to investigate such effects on interwar Europe. Acemoglu et al (2020) show that the electoral success of the Italian Fascist party in 1924 was a consequence of the Socialist party's success in the 1919 election. Using WW1 casualty shares as an instrument for the socialist vote share in 1919, the paper shows that the threat of communism (red scare) mobilized the conservative right-leaning middle class to vote for Mussolini.…”

Roads to innovation: Evidence from Italy

“…One further advantage of controlling for the lagged dependent variable is that it should take into account most of the time‐invariant (or slowly moving) unobserved heterogeneity at the regional NUTS‐3 level. Indeed, as argued by Acemoglu et al (2020) in a similar case, the lagged dependent variable may control for permanent differences in regional innovative patterns. Moreover, the empirical model includes also a set of control variables, $${X}_{i}$$.…”

Liberty, Security, and Accountability: The Rise and Fall of Illiberal Democracies

“…Cheibub, Hong and Przeworski (2020) document how more solid democracies were significantly slower in limiting individual freedoms to stop the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. The offer of protection against the threat of socialism or elite capture was also at the basis of the rhetoric of fascist regimes in the 1930s (Acemoglu, Feo, Luca and Russo, 2020). 10 Guriev and Treisman (2019, 2020b) document that many 21st Century autocracies and illiberal democracies (what they call "informational autocracies") maintain power through subtle control of information, rather than through violent repression of the oppositions.…”