Replication Data for: Elite Influence? Religion and the Electoral Success of the Nazis

In Weimar Germany, the Catholic Church vehemently warned ordinary parishioners about the dangers of extremist parties. We establish that constituencies' religious composition is the single most important empirical predictor of Nazi vote shares---dwarfing the explanatory power of any other demographic or socioeconomic variable. Even after carefully accounting for observational differences, Catholics were far less likely to vote for the NSDAP than their Protestant counterparts. The evidence suggests that this disparity was, in large part, due to the sway of the Catholic Church and its dignitaries. At the same time, we show that attempts to immunize Catholics against the radical left failed to achieve the desired result. To explain the puzzling asymmetry in the Church's influence at the ballot box, we develop a simple theoretical framework of elite influence in electoral politics.

魏玛共和国时期，天主教会曾严厉告诫普通教区居民提防极端主义政党的危害。本研究证实，选区的宗教构成是纳粹政党得票率最关键的实证预测因素，其解释力远超其他任何人口或社会经济变量。即便在严格控制观测差异后，天主教徒支持国家社会主义德意志工人党（NSDAP，即纳粹党）的概率仍远低于新教教徒。多项证据表明，这种投票倾向差异在很大程度上源于天主教会及其神职人员的影响力。与此同时，本研究还发现，旨在让天主教徒免受激进左翼思潮影响的相关尝试，并未达到预期效果。为解释教会在选举投票中展现出的这种令人费解的影响力不对称性，本研究构建了一个关于选举政治中精英影响力的简易理论框架。