Since the 2008 crisis, western governments' answer to every economic crash has been to smash the austerity button, dialing down public spending just as the private sector was also slamming the doors shut.
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Austerity-hit countries have also experienced the highest growth in fascist ideology, fascist violence and support for fascist parties - think of the surge of support in Greece for Golden Dawn.
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Anti-austerity activists predicted this, of course, citing Weimar-era austerity's role in the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party. Now, a group of interdisciplinary scholars have quantified the relationship between austerity and Naziism.
voxeu.org/article/fiscal…
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voxeu.org/article/fiscal…
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They used electoral data from 1,000+ towns and 100+ cities in the runup to the 1933 German elections, which, along with the Reichstag fire, allowed the Nazis to seize control over the German state.
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They found that "areas more severely affected by austerity had relatively higher vote shares for the Nazi Party" (and they controlled for confounding variables such as "city and election fixed effects").
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For each "standard deviation increase in the depth of austerity" there was "a two to five percentage point increase in vote share for the Nazis."
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This wasn't mere "pocket book voting" either: the Nazis picked up votes from the ruling party, but other parties, including rival far-right parties, did not.
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Moreover, the people who were absolutely worst off did not switch to the Nazis - rather, they threw their support behind the Communist Party.
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"This is consistent with the notion that those just above them in the economic hierarchy, who had more to lose from the tax hikes and spending cuts, favoured the Nazis when their party failed to provide them economic relief."
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