Coal Rush: The Built Legacy of the Industrial Revolution and the Rise of the Radical Right

Historical industrial centers have shifted to the right but have done so at different speeds and intensities. We argue that this variation can be explained by differences in the historical industrialization process. Communities that industrialized later and more intensively realign more toward the radical right today. This is because the built environment shaped by the original industrialization drives demographic persistence and neighborhood disadvantage. To examine our argument, we study the effects of nineteenth-century coal mining in Germany's Ruhr area. We match the geolocation of over 1,000 mining shafts, historical plant-level employment data, and the spread of company housing with contemporary electoral results at the neighborhood level. For identification, we exploit the depth of coal deposits that governed the adoption of deep-shaft mining. The findings demonstrate how the path of economic development influences voting in the long run.