Elite Influence? Religion, Economics, and the Rise of the Nazis

Jörg Spenkuch and Philipp Tillmann

VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Adolf Hitler's seizure of power was one of the most consequential events of the twentieth century. Yet, our understanding of which factors fueled the astonishing rise of the Nazis remains highly incomplete. This paper shows that religion played an important role in the Nazi party's electoral success---dwarfing all available socio-economic variables. To obtain the first causal estimates we exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the geographic distribution of Catholics and Protestants due to a peace treaty in the sixteenth century. Even after allowing for sizeable violations of the exclusion restriction, the evidence indicates that Catholics were significantly less likely to vote for the Nazi Party than Protestants. Consistent with the historical record, our results are most naturally rationalized by a model in which the Catholic Church leaned on believers to vote for the democratic Zentrum Party, whereas the Protestant Church remained politically neutral.

JEL-codes: D72 N34 Z12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/100491/1/VfS_2014_pid_535.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Elite Influence? Religion, Economics, and the Rise of the Nazis (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc14:100491

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in VfS Annual Conference 2014 (Hamburg): Evidence-based Economic Policy from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().