Two Germanys? Investigating the Religious and Social Base of the 1930 Nazi Electorate

Abstract

By applying data from the 1930 Reichstag election we test whether the NSDAP was a workers-, bourgeois, or a catch-all party. We argue that the degree to which the different groups in society voted NSDAP is dependent on the share of Protestants and Catholics in their respective Kreis. We build on two important works on the Nazi electorate, namely Jürgen Falter’s Hitlers Wähler (1991) and King, Rosen, Tanner, and Wagner (2008). We specifically make one important alteration to Falter and King et. al.’s models, as we introduce the interaction between religious affiliation and social groups as an explanation of Nazi vote. Similar arguments have been made by other historians, yet this has not been tested on data for the whole of Germany until Falter’s work in 1991. We find significant explanatory power in the interaction between religion and social groups on the propensity to vote for the Nazi party.