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15 October 2008

Who Voted for the Nazis?

While everyone is thinking about how the U.S. presidential election will turn out, I thought some of you might also be interested in a forthcoming Journal of Economic History article on a venerable electoral question -- why a democratic electorate in Germany chose a party which then ended their democracy. The article is "Ordinary Economic Voting Behavior in the Extraordinary Election of Adolf Hitler," by me, Ori Rosen, Martin Tanner, and Alex Wagner. There's also a good SwissInfo news story about our article.

Here's the 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.

Posted by Gary King at October 15, 2008 10:57 AM