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- Title
Hitler's electoral support: recent findings and theoretical implications.
- Authors
Hamilton, Richard F.
- Abstract
The paper examines reasons for the electoral successes of politician Adolf Hitler's in the last years of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The success was due to the focus on the lower-middle class. That class, so it is said, suffered serious economic strains, faced a loss of status and, in desperation, reacted by abandoning the liberal middle-class parties in favor of Adolf Hitler and his party, the National Socialist German Workers Party. The prime motive was supposedly the party's promise to restore the lower-middle class to its former assured position. The paper undertakes five principal tasks. The first of these will be to review some basic findings about the German elections of 1928, 1930, and 1932. The findings to be reported are sharply at variance with the lower-middle class explanation, pointing instead to a range of new explanatory questions that should be at the center of the thinking and research. The statement of these new questions is the second task of this paper. A third task is to provide a brief outline of an alternative explanation that accords with the evidence currently available. This provides a positive statement focusing on a different and more appropriate range of causal factors operating in those elections. The fourth task will be to provide some answers to the questions posed in part two of this paper based on the alternative lines of explanation offered here. A more wide-ranging discussion follows, reviewing the experience of other nations and of other times. The aim of the discussion, the fifth task is to provide additional tests of the original theory and of the alternative offered in the paper.
- Subjects
WEIMAR (Germany : Landkreis); GERMANY; HITLER, Adolf, 1889-1945; POLITICAL campaigns; MIDDLE class; SOCIAL classes; POLITICAL science
- Publication
Canadian Journal of Sociology, 1986, Vol 11, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
0318-6431
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/3340446