Austerity and the Rise of the Nazi party

NBER Working Paper No. 24106

Issued in December 2017, Revised in September 2020

NBER Program(s):Development of the American Economy



We study the link between ﬁscal austerity and Nazi electoral success. Voting data from a thousand districts and a hundred cities for four elections between 1930 and 1933 shows that areas more aﬀected by austerity (spending cuts and tax increases) had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi party. We also ﬁnd that the localities with relatively high austerity experienced relatively high suﬀering (measured by mortality rates) and these areas’ electorates were more likely to vote for the Nazi party. Our ﬁndings are robust to a range of speciﬁcations including an instrumental variable strategy and a border-pair policy discontinuity design.

Acknowledgments and Disclosures

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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w24106

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