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Voting Behavior and Public Employment in Nazi Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2018

Stephan E. Maurer
Stephan E. Maurer*
Affiliation:
Stephan E. Maurer is Assistant Professor, University of Konstanz and Research Associate, Centre for Economic Performance. University of Konstanz, Department of Economics, Box D 124, D-78457 Konstanz. E-mail: stephan.maurer@uni-konstanz.de.
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Abstract

This article analyzes whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5 percent.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , March 2018 , pp. 1 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 2018 

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Footnotes

I thank the editor Ann Carlos and three anonymous referees for comments and suggestions that have significantly improved this paper. Further thanks are due to Steve Pischke, Guy Michaels, Michel Azulai, Sascha Becker, Florian Blum, Abel Brodeur, Robin Burgess, Marta De Philippis, Georg Graetz, Kilian Huber, Yu-Hsiang Lei, Andrei Potlogea, Robin Schädler, Pedro Souza, Daniel Sturm, Andrea Tesei, Nico Voigtländer, and seminar participants at the LSE Labour Work in Progress Seminar, and the 3rd LSE and Macrohist Interwar Economic History Workshop for their helpful comments. I also thank Michael Beaney from the LSE Language Centre for proofreading the manuscript. Financial support in the form of a LSE Ph.D. Scholarship is gratefully acknowledged. All remaining errors are my own.

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