Turning Out for the Führer? Local Activism, Voter Turnout and the Electoral Performance of the Nazi Party

Eric Jones’ work reminds us how susceptible growth-promoting, liberal democratic societies are to usurpation by authoritarian, statist regimes. The rise of the Nazis through the electoral processes of Weimar Germany provides arguably the most important modern example of such a transition. The extent to which the Nazis’ successes were due to their ability to use innovative organisational and campaigning techniques to mobilise voter turnout, while often assumed in the literature, has rarely been deeply examined from an empirical perspective. In this chapter, we investigate the relationship between local precinct-based activities of the Nazi Party and voter turnout in the pivotal July 1932 Reichstag election. We find each additional Nazi Party member per 10,000 eligible voters was associated, at the mean, with eight to eleven additional voters on election day. This result is robust to a series of sensitivity checks. We also find that voter turnout was a channel through which local Nazi organisational strength increased its share of the vote, while supressing that of the communists. These results add a fresh new level of empirically grounded knowledge to our understanding of the electoral rise of the Nazis.