War, Socialism, and the Rise of Fascism: an Empirical Exploration

Abstract

The recent ascent of right-wing populist movements in several countries has rekindled interest in understanding the causes of the rise of Fascism in inter-war years. In this paper, we argue that there was a strong link between the surge of support for the Socialist Party after World War I (WWI) and the subsequent emergence of Fascism in Italy. We first develop a source of variation in socialist support across Italian municipalities in the 1919 election based on war casualties from the area. We show that these casualties are unrelated to a battery of political, economic, and social variables before the war and had a major impact on socialist support (partly because the Socialists were the main antiwar political movement). Our main result is that this boost to socialist support (that is “exogenous” to the prior political leaning of the municipality) led to greater local fascist activity as measured by local party branches and fascist political violence, and to significantly larger vote share of the Fascist Party in the 1921 and 1924 elections. We also provide evidence that landowner associations and greater presence of local elites played an important role in the rise of Fascism. Finally, we find greater likelihood of Jewish deportations in 1943–45 and lower vote share for Christian Democrats after World War II in areas with greater early fascist activity.

Scared Straight? Threat and Assimilation of Refugees in Germany

“…Overall, threat levels are most pronounced in Eastern Germany -a pattern especially apparent for the rightwing vote and hate crimes against refugees. This is in line with the literature connecting a history of socialism with right-wing attitudes (Acemoglu et al, 2021;Lange, 2021).…”

Fascistville: Mussolini’s new towns and the persistence of neo-fascism

“…Online Appendix Table B24 shows robustness of the results presented in Table 6 to the exclusion of (1) municipalities that are in the northern part of the Country, (2) municipalities that are far away from the New Towns, and (3) to the inclusion of macro-regions fixed effects. Section 6.1 provides evidence in favor of the hypothesis that the 1924 can be used as a measure of local support for the fascists, in line with other works (Acemoglu et al, 2022).…”

“…While the limited benefits of the sharecropper contract offered to the settlers (Treves, 1976, p. 76) and the inhospitable environment induced dissatisfaction and the desire of many to return home 11 (Ipsen, 1996, p. 107) "the New Towns were of enormous propaganda significance for the government, whose ability to produce functioning towns from swamplands in a very short time, almost by magic, certainly enhanced the propaganda value of the reclamation" (Ghirardo, 1989, p. 26). 10 The present paper also relates to Acemoglu et al (2022), who study the rise of Italian Fascism, and Gagliarducci et al (2020) who study the resistance to it. While those papers mainly focus on short-term effects, Acemoglu et al (2022) explores also long-term effects and find evidence of a reversal between the Fascist and the Neo-fascist votes.…”

“…10 The present paper also relates to Acemoglu et al (2022), who study the rise of Italian Fascism, and Gagliarducci et al (2020) who study the resistance to it. While those papers mainly focus on short-term effects, Acemoglu et al (2022) explores also long-term effects and find evidence of a reversal between the Fascist and the Neo-fascist votes. While they show that the reversal occurred on average, they don't focus on areas were the Fascist infrastructures were built.…”

Roads to innovation: Evidence from Italy

“…One further advantage of controlling for the lagged dependent variable is that it should take into account most of the time-invariant (or slowly moving) unobserved heterogeneity at the regional NUTS-3 level. Indeed, as argued by Acemoglu et al (2020) in a similar case, the lagged dependent variable may control for permanent differences in regional innovative patterns. 20 Moreover, the empirical model includes also a set of control variables, X i .…”