IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hes/wpaper/0295.html

Physical Memories of the Past and Support for the Far-Right: Evidence from Inter-War Denmark

Author

Listed:
  • Lasse Aaskoven

    (University of Southern Denmark)

  • Christian Vedel

    (University of Southern Denmark)

Abstract

A growing literature concerns the role of symbolic politics, including how political parties benefit electorally from politicizing the past, a strategy which should be more effective in localities with physical memories of the past. We test this argument by studying the effect of the local concentration of pre-Christian monuments on electoral support for the Danish Nazi Party -- a far-right party who relied heavily on the symbols of Denmark's pre-Christian past in its propaganda -- in Danish parliamentary elections 1935-1943. In contrast to the proposed theoretical argument, we find no evidence that Danish localities with a greater concentration of pre-Christian monuments saw greater electoral support for the Danish Nazi Party. These findings hint at the limits of symbolic politics for electoral support for the far-right and suggest that investigating the scope conditions for the political effects of physical memories of the past may be a fruitful avenue for future research.

Suggested Citation

  • Lasse Aaskoven & Christian Vedel, 2026. "Physical Memories of the Past and Support for the Far-Right: Evidence from Inter-War Denmark," Working Papers 0295, European Historical Economics Society (EHES).
    • Handle: RePEc:hes:wpaper:0295
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ehes.org/wp/EHES_295.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • N44 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - Europe: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hes:wpaper:0295. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christian Vedel (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ehessea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.