From my forthcoming book co-edited with Jeronimo. . . This part is by Chuck Cameron and myself:
What percentage of votes cast in national elections in Germany’s Weimar period were cast in favor of the Nazis or other antidemocratic parties? The answer is: 33% for the Nazi Party and 17% for the Communist Party of Germany in the eighth German Federal Election on November 21, 1932, and 44% for the Nazi Party and 12% for the Communist Party of Germany in the ninth German Federal Election on March 5, 1933. In other words, a large portion of the electorate did not support antidemocratic parties.
This factoid suggests a very different world from one in which an overwhelming majority of the German public voted for the Nazis. Knowing this factoid might lead us to ask a question requiring systematic data: When democracies perish, how much support for the antidemocratic forces is there in the public at large? This question has a real normative punch, because it is another way of asking whether mass electorates can be trusted with democracy. And then: If mass electorates can be trusted and the problem is antidemocratic elites, how can we protect democracy from its elite enemies?
An interesting related question, perhaps falling closer to psychology or history than political science, is why it is such a common belief that the Nazis won in a democratic election. Perhaps this (false) belief is popular because it leads to an interesting story and a “paradox” of democracy – What should be done if an antidemocratic party wins in a democratic election? – or perhaps it simply arose from a misunderstanding of historical writings.
Very nice…when this year is the book due to arrive?
I'm not sure . . . a few months, maybe?
I'd always heard the 33% number, probably first in eighth-grade history. I don't think I went to a particularly special school: yet another suburban public intermediate school, more or less. A quick look at Wikipedia implies that is the correct number to quote: the 1933 election seems not to have been a fair one.
Cool…I'll be keeping an eye out for it :)
I would lay the second result at the feet of their post-takeover propaganda efforts.
Just for scale, 44% for the Nazis is more than Bill Clinton got when he won in 1992.
When Bill Clinton won the U.S. presidency with a plurality that was less than 50% of the vote, he was nevertheless accepted as the democratically elected president of the U.S. When George W Bush was elected without even a plurality, he was accepted by most people as the democratically elected president — and for those who didn't accept his victory, it wasn't because he didn't get a plurality, it was because of irregularities in vote counting in Florida.
In short, just because a person or party doesn't get a majority, doesn't mean they "didn't win in a democratic election."
I don't know what the electoral rules in Germany were in the 1930s — indeed, I know little about what they are now — and without that information, I don't feel confident that the section quoted here is really portraying things right. If the Nazis got 44% of the vote (a plurality) and the Communists got 12%, then what's wrong with the statement "The Nazis won, and a majority of voters voted for anti-democratic parties"?
I thought that a lot of European countries had multi-party parliamentary systems where no party gets a majority and the govt is controlled by a party with only a plurality of the vote. Why was Hitler's Germany any different from a lot of countries today?
Is that really a common belief? Before now, I'd never heard that.
Roger's right. The president appointed Hitler as Kanzler (i.e., prime minister) because he was the leader of the plurality party. Hitler then formed a coalition government that included several non-Nazi conservatives. This is pretty much how things work in many continental European countries: if no party has a legislative majority, the leader of the plurality party forms a coalition.
I agree with the above comments that getting 44% and thus being the party that got most votes wins the election. In fact, when I remember things from school right, 44% is an amazing result for an election in the Weimar republic with its wide range of political parties, and 1933 was the only time then that any party got more than 40% of the votes. For example, the next best party, the socialdemocrats, got only around 20% in that election. Right now in Germany, the "most popular" party and most likely winner of the next election, the christian democratic party, is at something like 37% in the polls. Under certain circumstances, 44% in the next election might even be sufficient to get more than 50% of the seats in the Bundestag.
Another thing is that the partner of the Nazis in the coalition at the time of the election, the DNVP, another extreme right-wing party (though not as anti-democratic as the NSDAP), got about 8%, so the current government got the support of the majority of voters – quite unusual for the Weimar republic. The members of DNVP later all joined the NSDAP.
Finally, I think it is dangerous to say "the Nazis never won in a democratic election". Exactly this statement has occasionally been used here in Germany as an "excuse", by saying: the Nazis never won more than 50% of the votes in a multi-party election, so never more than 50% of Germans supported them, and then the Nazis captured the state and so on. This is just not true, and today you do not here it very often any more, but it also should not be supported.
Hi,
another question: Is it true that if a guy voted for the Nazis and the comunnists they supported anti-democraticas parties?
Ok, in retrospect, we know the nazis wer not democratic, but is far from clear that everyone who voted for the nazi (or the communist) bilieved that they were anti-democratica. After all, they were engaged in elections and until the (then) present they wore respecting the rules!