Gregori Galofré Vilà, Christopher Meissner, Martin McKee, David Stuckler 

 
Many Western countries pursued deep austerity measures in response to debts from the financial crisis of 2007-2008, and may again do so in the wake of COVID-19 stimulus packages. This column reviews how in the early 1930s, austerity measures worsened social suffering and contributed to political unrest paving the way for the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany. The authors argue that the absence of a coherent response to social suffering from the Weimar government worsened the slump, contributing to the radicalisation and polarisation of the German electorate.

Many pages have been written about what drove Hitler to power. While economic factors (from the Great Depression to high unemployment rates) and socio-cultural conditions (arising from the oppressive measures in the Treaty of Versailles) played an indisputably important role, the rapid rise of the Nazi Party is still, nearly a century later, a topic of considerable debate (Adena et al. 2015, Doerr et al. 2018, Eichengreen 2018, Ferguson and Voth 2008, Satyanath et al. 2017, Voigtländer and Voth 2012, Voth 2020).

In our recent work, we show how fiscal austerity contributed to Nazi electoral success in the early 1930s (Galofré-Vilà et al. 2020). Localities that experienced larger declines in spending and higher rises in taxes had higher vote shares for the Nazi Party in each and every German federal election between 1930 and 1933

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Πηγή: voxeu.org