Journal article
War and nationalism: how WW1 battle deaths fueled civilians’ support for the Nazi Party
- Abstract:
- Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians’ indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war exposure, we machine-coded information on 7.5 million German soldiers who were wounded or died in WW1. Our empirical strategy leverages battlefield dynamics that cause plausibly exogenous variation in the county-level casualty fatality rate—the share of dead soldiers among all casualties. We find that throughout the interwar period, electoral support for right-wing nationalist parties, including the Nazi Party, was 2.6 percentage points higher in counties with above-median casualty fatality rates. Consistent with our proposed mechanism, we find that this effect was driven by civilians rather than veterans and areas with a preexisting tradition of collective war commemoration.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 2.2MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/s000305542300014x
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Journal:
- American Political Science Review More from this journal
- Volume:
- 181
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 144 - 162
- Publication date:
- 2023-03-30
- Acceptance date:
- 2023-02-10
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1537-5943
- ISSN:
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0003-0554
- Language:
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English
- Pubs id:
-
1343821
- Local pid:
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pubs:1343821
- Deposit date:
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2023-05-23
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- De Juan et al
- Copyright date:
- 2023
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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