How did the Nazis vote? Historical parliamentary open data!

[blogpost] Nazis

<p>How did the Nazis vote? Historical parliamentary open data!</p>

<p>Parliamentary open data is usually a matter of <a href="http://blog.openingparliament.org/post/92425529388/global-survey-parliamentary-voting-data-remains"><strong>recent years</strong></a>, but not always. There are few parliaments with various types of data dating back decades and sometimes even centuries. An extreme case is the US Congress where several key pieces of information can be traced back to 1789, e.g. <a href="http://voteview.com/"><strong>results of plenary voting</strong></a>. I recently came across a unique dataset of voting in the national parliament of Germany right before the Nazis took over in 1930s.</p>

<p>Results of roll call votes in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_%28Weimar_Republic%29"><strong>Reichstag</strong></a>, the lower chamber of the parliament of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_Republic"><strong>Weimar Republic</strong></a>, the interwar German federation in 1920-1932, was collected by <a href="http://www.researchgate.net/publication/248118469_Dimensionality_of_the_Weimar_Republic_from_1920_to_1932"><strong>Martin Ejnar Hansen and Marc Debus</strong></a>. Not all plenary votes were recorded by names of individual MPs but the dataset is still a unique source of valuable historical insight into what is arguably the most prominent case of a failure of democracy.</p>

<p>In order to visualize voting patterns of MPs, I use a <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/12oXJUjXieg8oyUZs5HlEGquCuh9uacu8rqgvBQqHM1E/edit"><strong>weighted principal component analysis model</strong></a> developed by <a href="https://twitter.com/skopmichal"><strong>Michal Skop</strong></a>. The output of the model is a chart below where every point represents one MP and mutual distances between points correspond to how often various MPs voted the same way: if two MPs vote similarly, their points are very close in the chart. If they usually cast opposite votes (e.g. one in favour and the other against), they are very distant.</p>

<iframe src="http://kohovolit.eu/wp/kamil/FunWithVotes/WG_lower_1-5_g_by_terms_4.htm" width=550 height=480 scrolling=no frameborder=0></iframe>

<p>The chart is animated. Just press the "Play" button in the bottom left corner of the chart to see how voting behaviour of MPs changed over the course of history. As you can see, MPs from the same party usually voted the same way, they are therefore clustered together in the chart.</p>

<p>In order to better understand the visualization I also include the following charts that represent "snapshots" of individual parliamentary terms. Colours of political parties are different but positions of MPs are the same. The charts also contain cutting lines that correspond to individual parliamentary votes. Each line represents one vote and all MPs on one side of the line voted the same way (e.g. in favour) while all MPs on the other side voted the opposite way (e.g. against).</p>

<p>The first chart corresponds to the first term of 1920-1924. The Nazis are not present in the parliament yet. Adolf Hitler only entered the Nazi party in 1921 and at that point, it was only one of dozens of insignificant political movements in the young republic.</p>

<iframe src="http://kohovolit.eu/wp/kamil/FunWithVotes/WG_lower_1-5_d3_term_1/with_cuttlines/index.html" width=550 height=550 scrolling=no frameborder=0></iframe>

<p>In the parliament, MPs split into two groups: the socialists in the bottom left section of the chart and the bourgeoisie in the bottom right section. These two groups voted against each other during most votes: almost all cutting lines run through the chart from top left corner to the bottom right corner and split the MPs into the two clusters based on the labour-capital division.</p>

<p>The following chart shows voting patterns in the following term of 1924-1928. The Nazis held 14 seats in this parliament and are located in the centre of the chart (brown). The Reichstag was still split between the socialists and the bourgeoisie and the Nazi MPs were somewhere between these two groups: they sometimes supported the political left and sometimes the political right.</p>

<iframe src="http://kohovolit.eu/wp/kamil/FunWithVotes/WG_lower_1-5_d3_term_3/with_cuttlines/index.html" width=550 height=550 scrolling=no frameborder=0></iframe>

<p>The situation became much more interesting during the 1928-1930 term. At that point, the Reichstag was actually divided into as many as five separate voting blocks. This is because in addition to the old labour-capital division, a new cleavage appeared between the parties that defended the democratic regime and the parties that demanded a radical change. The latter included the Nazis (obviously) but also the Communists who fought for the proletariat revolution and DNVP (blue), a far-right nationalist party that demanded restoration of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire"><strong>pre-WWI authoritarian monarchy</strong></a>.</p>

<iframe src="http://kohovolit.eu/wp/kamil/FunWithVotes/WG_lower_1-5_d3_term_4/with_cuttlines/index.html" width=550 height=550 scrolling=no frameborder=0></iframe>

<p>These two divisions (labour-capital, democracy-authoritarianism) correspond to two types of votes: cutting lines that run from the top left to the bottom right represent votes when the socialist and the communist (in the bottom section of the chart) voted against the bourgeois parties (in the top section). The lines that cut the chart almost vertically represent votes when the democratic parties in the left section of the chart voted against those that demanded dismantling the republic in the right section of the chart.</p>

<p>The Nazis actually lost several seats in the 1928 general elections but several well-known party members with fascinating personal histories entered the parliament for the first time, e.g. the future master of propaganda <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels"><strong>Joseph Goebbels</strong></a>, the chief of the Nazi air force <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring"><strong>Hermann Goring</strong></a> or the author of the infamous anti-Jewish <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws"><strong>Nuremberg Laws</strong></a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Frick"><strong>Wilhelm Frick</strong></a>.</p>

<p>The last chart shows voting patterns shortly before the Nazi takeover. As we can see, the labour-capital division of the parliament is almost completely gone and there is only one dominant cleavage: the division between the defenders of the republic, which includes the socialists and the bourgeois parties in the top left corner, and the anti-democratic forces in the bottom right corner that consist of the Nazis (brown), the Communists (dark red) and extreme nationalists (blue).</p>

<iframe src="http://kohovolit.eu/wp/kamil/FunWithVotes/WG_lower_1-5_d3_term_5/with_cuttlines/index.html" width=550 height=550 scrolling=no frameborder=0></iframe>

<p>This underlines the deep political crisis of the Weimar Republic that was mainly caused by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression"><strong>Great Depression</strong></a> that hit Germany hard in early 1930s. The young democracy quickly found itself under attack from several directions: from fascists and other <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versailles_Treaty"><strong>Versailles Treaty</strong></a> revisionists on one extreme and from Marxist- Leninists on the other.</p>

<p>It is ironic that although the Nazis and the Communists were literally mortal enemies and their vision of future Germany was radically different, their MPs actually voted almost exactly the same way in the parliament. In several subsequent general elections, Adolf Hitler managed to win an overwhelming share of the vote and was eventually appointed the Chancellor. And the rest, as they say, is history…</p>

<p><a href="https://twitter.com/kamilgregor"><strong>Kamil Gregor</strong></a> is a data analyst with <a href="http://kohovolit.eu/en/"><strong>KohoVolit.eu</strong></a> and <a href="http://www.muni.cz/?lang=en"><strong>Masaryk University</strong></a> in Brno, Czech Republic.</p>