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In a recent study, a team of economists, amongst others from the University of Passau, shows that the pandemic more than 100 years ago resulted in a stable shift towards left-wing parties; extremists could not benefit.
In 1918, a mysterious disease started to spread. It began with fever, cough, headache and pain in the limbs; often people died a few day later. As the pandemic coincided with the decisive phase of the First World War, politicians took no action out of concern for the morale of the population. Censorship prevailed, and the press did hardly report the outbreak. Yet, the pandemic must nevertheless have been salient for the population. According to estimates, the Spanish flu killed more than 400,000 people in Germany in just a few months - comparable to deaths from the First World War in an entire year of war.
A team of economists from the Universities of Passau, Cologne and Rome as well as from the German Medical Association applied modern microeconometric techniques to historical data on deaths and election results from all German constituencies and more than 200 cities in the period from 1893 to 1933. By doing so, they were able to analyse how the Spanish flu affected voting behaviour in the Weimar Republic. The results have been published amongst others as a CESifo working paper under the title "The Political Effects of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Weimar Germany”.
The findings at a glance:
• In regions that were more fiercely affected by the Spanish flu, the left-leaning party bloc gained 8.1 percent compared to the elections before the outbreak of the pandemic.
• In the left-leaning camp, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in particular benefited - and not just in the short term. The effect remained stable in the period under observation until 1933. The pandemic did not strengthen extreme parties.
• In a series of tests, we rule out that the effect of the Spanish flu is confounded by other possible causes such as poverty and inequality or war-related developments.
“One might think that the Spanish Flu was one of many factors that contributed to the rise of the Nazis. But in our paper we show that this is not the case”, says Stefan Bauernschuster, Professor of Public Economics and Dean of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Passau. "The pandemic has not strengthened the extreme parties, but the moderate left, specifically the Social Democrats."
The economists' analyses indicate that with the pandemic, public health became an important issue, in which the Social Democratic Party could claim expertise – already prior to the outbreak of the Spanish flu. According to the researchers, the SPD had already included the issue of public health, with a focus on the working population, in its election programmes before the pandemic and was strongly represented in the self-governing bodies of the health insurance companies.
About the team of authors
Dr Christoph König, assistant professor at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome, had the idea for the paper. While analysing election data, he noticed the connection between a shift to the left and excess mortality in 1918, which is now the subject of the current working paper. Stefan Bauernschuster, Professor of Public Economics at the University of Passau, and Erik Hornung, Professor of Economic History at the University of Cologne, follow up on a joint study in which they also used historical death data to analyse the effect of the first universal compulsory health insurance under Bismarck. Also involved in the study was Dr Matthias Blum, economist and policy advisor at the German Medical Association. The latter had compiled historical death data and causes of death for 213 German cities, which were incorporated into the current study.
The study has been published as a working paper by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), by CESifo, in the ECONtribute series of the Universities Bonn and Cologne and the Discussion Paper Series of the IZA - Institute of Labor Economics.
Four questions to the authors on the methodology and their findings
How to identify excess mortality from Spanish flu without data on causes of death?
At the constituency level, we can rely on mortality data, but these do not include any information on causes of death. Therefore, we use econometric methods to try to predict excess mortality from the Spanish flu. In a first step, we use mortality data from 1904 to 1913 and calculate constituency-specific predictions for mortality in 1914 to 1918 on this basis. In all these years, we find higher mortality than would have been expected in the absence of war, with excess mortality in 1918 being even higher than in the other war years due to the Spanish flu. In a second step, we use excess mortality in the war years 1914 to 1917 to predict what excess mortality would have been in 1918 without the Spanish flu. The difference between the actual value in 1918 and our prediction could be the excess mortality caused by the Spanish flu, if our method works as desired. We then test whether our method works at the district level, because here we have data on causes of death. And indeed, it works. We see that our measure of excess mortality from Spanish flu increases by exactly one for each physician-identified influenza death. Our measure, on the other hand, does not respond to war deaths. As a result, we can identify Spanish flu deaths in constituencies, even though we don't actually have any data on them at this level.
Did the Spanish flu cause the shift to the left?
To provide this evidence, we now compare the evolution of voting behaviour in particularly affected regions with those where there were fewer flu deaths in a dynamic difference-in-differences model over the period from 1893 to 1939. This model allows us to factor out constant regional differences as well as general time effects that applied to all regions.
Now, of course, from the last Reichstag election before the outbreak of the Spanish flu in the German Empire in 1912 to the first election thereafter in 1919 in the Weimar Republic, there were serious changes in the political system. These included the switch from majority to proportional representation, the lowering of the voting age, changes in the party landscape and the introduction of women's suffrage. To allow us to compare results nonetheless, we work with constituency boundaries from the Empire, group parties into three larger groups, the left-leaning bloc, the centrist bloc, and the right-leaning bloc, and control for constituency-specific changes in the electorate.
The results show that constituencies with higher and constituencies with lower influenza mortality follow a very similar trend in the complete pre-pandemic period, i.e., from 1893 to 1912, the last election before the Spanish flu. Only after the Spanish flu do we observe a significant increase in vote shares for the left-leaning bloc in constituencies with higher influenza deaths compared to constituencies with lower influenza deaths. If the number of influenza deaths increases by 2 per 1,000 population, which corresponds to an increase of about 30 percent of the average influenza mortality, the left-wing vote share increases by 8.1 percent compared to 1912. This effect remains stable until 1933. The right-leaning bloc, on the other hand, loses (see right graph).
Do other reasons come into question?
This is what the bulk of our paper is about: we check how robust, how valid our finding is by ruling out other reasons that could possibly also explain this shift to the left. Other reasons for the shift to the left could be, for example, increased poverty or inequality during the World War I years. We use data on wealth and income to calculate Gini coefficients, a statistical measure of inequality, and use data on the share of the poor. However, the inclusion of these control variables in our model does not change the effect of the Spanish flu. We also examine trends in infant mortality in affected areas, as this is often considered an important indicator of precarious living conditions, such as food shortages. However, it is not the case that infant mortality trends are different in constituencies with higher influenza mortality than in constituencies with lower influenza mortality before 1918. Data on city-level causes of death also show that our effects are indeed driven by mortality due to respiratory disease, the very death category in which influenza deaths are included. Moreover, we do not find even remotely similar effects for excess mortality from the war years before 1918, nor for excess mortality in 1918 that is not explained by the Spanish flu. Thus, we conclude that this shift to the left was really caused specifically by the Spanish flu.
Why this shift to the left?
Political science often explains voting behaviour by arguing that voters reward politicians for good policies or punish them for bad policies. But in our constellation, this is not true; our data show that the winners of the past election(s) in a constituency are neither systematically more nor systematically less likely to gain votes as a result of the Spanish flu. Another possibility would be a protest vote that strengthens extremist parties. But we do not see that either. There is no evidence of increased polarization in the affected areas. Rather, our analysis, in which we break down the left bloc, shows that with the SPD, the moderate left is winning. The Communist Party is actually losing.
The most plausible explanation for our results is provided by the "issue ownership" theory from political science. This states that parties that occupy an issue and credibly signal expertise in it register gains in votes as soon as this issue becomes more important to the population. The SPD succeeded in establishing and occupying health as a public issue - and not just with the outbreak of the Spanish flu. Unlike other parties, the SPD had already included the issue of health, with a focus on the working population, in its election programs before that. The party was also strongly involved in the self-governing bodies of the health insurance funds. The SPD had originally fiercely criticized the compulsory health insurance introduced by Bismarck in 1884 as an attempt to bribe the working classes. It is an irony of history, however, that the SPD subsequently succeeded in taking credit for this revolutionary social policy measure. We do find yet another piece of evidence for the "issue-ownership" theory: Our analyses show that the liberals were also able to gain political capital out of the pandemic - and thus precisely the party to which many physicians belonged and which had supported the social hygiene movement.
Professor Stefan Bauernschuster
University of Passau
Chair of Public Economics
Innstraße 27, 94032 Passau
E-mail: stefan.bauernschuster@uni-passsau.de
https://cepr.org/publications/dp18277
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10531.pdf
https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_241_2023.pdf
https://docs.iza.org/dp16291.pdf
https://www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege/2023/study-on-the-spanish-flu contribution by the authors in the Digital Research Magazine
Stefan Bauernschuster, Professor of Public Economics at the University of Passau
University of Passau
University of Passau
The graph shows voting for the left-leaning party bloc in constituencies that were particularly affe ...
University of Passau
University of Passau
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Stefan Bauernschuster, Professor of Public Economics at the University of Passau
University of Passau
University of Passau
The graph shows voting for the left-leaning party bloc in constituencies that were particularly affe ...
University of Passau
University of Passau
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