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The impact of the global credit crisis and Great Recession has been more than just economic. In both parliamentary and presidential democracies, governments have been ousted. Hard economic times have increased political polarization and bred support for nationalist and right-wing political parties. All this gives rise to fears that economic hard times will feed political extremism, as it did in the 1930s.
Memories of the 1930s inform much contemporary political commentary, just as they inform recent economic commentary. But exactly what impact the interwar depression and economic crisis had on the electoral fortunes of extremist parties has not been systematically studied.1Many of our intuitions about the links between the Depression and political extremism are informed by the case of Germany. There, both communists and fascists saw their vote shares increase sharply as the economic crisis deepened after 1929. The view that this link was causal is widely shared. And the horrific consequences of what followed have led observers, whether consciously or not, to generalize from the German experience.
But was what was true of Germany--that bad economic times fed support for political extremists on both the left and right--also true of other countries? Germany, it can be argued, was distinctive. It was a country in which the Great Depression was unusually severe. A reactionary agrarian aristocracy is said to have hindered the development of democratic culture before 1914. Its population was divided by religion, class, and ideology. The experience of defeat in World War I had a radicalizing effect. The Weimar Republic's electoral system made it easy for small parties to enter Parliament. All these factors have been suggested as reasons for the rise of political extremism in interwar Germany. But it is not clear to what extent one can generalize from German experience and conclude that they were important elsewhere.
Answering such questions is our goal in this article. We study the share of votes for extremists in elections in 28 countries between World Wars I and II, focusing on right- and left-wing anti-system parties--that is, parties explicitly advocating the overthrow of a country's political system.2
Consistent with German experience, we find a link between right-wing political extremism and economic conditions, as captured...