Radio and the Rise of the Nazis in Prewar Germany

By Maja Adena, R. Enikolopov, Maria Petrova, V. Santarosa, E. Zhuravskaya. Social Science Research Network, 2015

475 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How far can the media protect or undermine democratic institutions in unconsolidated democracies, and how persuasive can they be in ensuring public support for dictator's policies? We study this question in the context of Germany between 1929 and 1939. Using geographical and temporal variation in radio availability, we show that radio had a significant negative effect on the Nazi electoral support between 1929 and 1932, when political news were slanted against Nazi party. This effect was reversed in just 5 weeks following Hitler's appointment as chancellor and the transfer of control of the radio to the Nazis. Pro-Nazi radio propaganda caused higher vote for the Nazis in March 1933 election. After full consolidation of power, radio propaganda helped the Nazis to enroll new party members and encouraged denunciations of Jews and other open expressions of anti-Semitism. The effect of Nazi propaganda was not uniform. Depending on listeners' priors about the message, propaganda could be very effective or could backfire. Nazi radio was most effective in places where anti-Semitism was historically high and had a negative effect on the support for anti-Semitic policies in places with historically low anti-Semitism.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/449fa3d2fb2ef2d2aa42db80ad1a0dff212863fa

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Citations in the corpus

Bowling for Fascism: Social Capital and the Rise of the Nazi Party (2017, unknown): “In addition, we draw on voting results from King et al. (2008) and on a host of socioeconomic data including the number of welfare recipients, war veterans, average tax payments, and the number of Hitler speeches in the early 1930s from Adena et al. (2015).”
Do Online Advertisements Increase Political Candidates’ Name Recognition or Favorability? Evidence from Randomized Field Experiments (2014, background): “27 See also a growing experimental and quasi-experimental literature on the broader political and social effects of the mass media (e.g., Adena et al. 2013; Paluck and Green 2009).”
Misinformation During a Pandemic (2020, unknown): “1 percent, well within the range of comparable estimates; for example, Martin and Yurukoglu (2017) find a Fox News persuasion rate on voting behavior of 58 percent in 2000, 27 percent in 2004, and 28 percent in 2008; Adena et al. (2015) finds a persuasion rate of up to 36.8 percent; and Enikolopov e”
The Persuasive Effect of Fox News: Non-Compliance with Social Distancing During the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020, unknown): “(2011) find a voter persuasion rate of 66% from an independent television channel broadcasting against voting for United Russia in the 1999 Russian parliamentary elections; and Adena et al. (2015) measure a”
Media Bias in China (2018, methodology): “Given these fixed positions, consumers will be divided into three categories based on their preference ordering: (1) a share dp are Party Cadres who prefer a Party paper to a Commercial paper to no newspaper; (2) a share dc are Commercial Audience who prefer a Commercial paper to no paper to a Party”
Media and Politics (2015, background): “The role of the radio in the rise of fascism in Germany is studied by Adena et al. (2013).”
The Impact of Media Censorship: 1984 or Brave New World? (2019, unknown): “We show that censorship can effectively manip3For example, DellaVigna and Kaplan (2007) and Gerber, Karlan, and Bergan (2009) on the US; Yanagizawa-Drott (2014) on Rwanda Genocide; Adena et al. (2015) on Nazi Germany; and Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya (2011) on contemporary Russia. DellaVigna”
Explosive connections? Mass media, social media, and the geography of collective violence in African states (2015, background): “…state loyalty and national unity, and can therefore be expected to foster vertical linkages between state and society, 1 Along similar lines, see Adena et al. (2013) for a discussion of the use of radio to deploy divisive appeals in Nazi Germany, but see also Kern & Hainmueller (2009) for…”