Abstract
Contemporary political behavior is often affected by historical legacies, but the specific mechanisms through which these legacies are transmitted are difficult to pin down. This paper argues that historical political conflicts can affect political behavior over several generations when they trigger an enduring organizational mobilization. It studies how the oppression of German Catholics in the nineteenth century led to a regionally differentiated mobilization of political Catholicism that still affects political support for the radical rightAlternative für Deutschland(AfD) today. Using newly collected data on historical oppression events, it shows that Catholic regions where oppression was intense saw greater mobilization of Catholic lay organizations than Catholic regions where oppression was milder and show lower support for the AfD today. The paper thus contributes to the literature on the historical determinants of political behavior as well as to the question of which regional context effects strengthen or weaken the radical right.
Highlights
W hy are people in some regions more willing to support the radical right while people in other regions are more reluctant to do so? A growing literature argues that such differences are partly driven by long historical continuities underlying political behavior (Cantoni, Hagemeister, and Westcott 2019; Hoerner, Jaax, and Rodon 2019; Homola, Pereira, and Tavits 2020; Ochsner and Roesel 2017)
I show that the association between historical oppression and Catholic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) support holds at different levels of analysis before I analyze the mechanism behind this association
This study empirically demonstrates that regional differences in the development of political Catholicism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still shape the development of the German party system and the regionally differentiated rise of the radical right today
Summary
W hy are people in some regions more willing to support the radical right while people in other regions are more reluctant to do so? A growing literature argues that such differences are partly driven by long historical continuities underlying political behavior (Cantoni, Hagemeister, and Westcott 2019; Hoerner, Jaax, and Rodon 2019; Homola, Pereira, and Tavits 2020; Ochsner and Roesel 2017). I argue that the mobilization of the Catholic milieu provides the mechanism that links the regional history of oppression to contemporary AfD vote shares.
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