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The Nazi Vote: A National Ecological Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 1982

Courtney Brown
Courtney Brown*
Affiliation:
Washington University
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Abstract

Two models of voting are often used to explain the Nazi vote in the Weimar Republic. The first model states that the Nazis' electoral successes resulted from Protestant petty bourgeois and peasant support for fascism. The second model argues that the Nazis gained the bulk of their support from newly mobilized voters. Previous analyses of these models are plagued with serious problems due to their limited data base. This study reassesses these models with the use of an unusually complete data set for all of Germany and concludes that much of the previous work examining the Nazi vote wrongly identifies the Protestant petty bourgeoisie as the major contributor to the Nazi vote. The Nazis received important levels of support from Protestant peasants, new voters, and Catholic petty bourgeoisie.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 76 , Issue 2 , June 1982 , pp. 285 - 302
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1982

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