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.
Links to the original publications:
- Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR): https://cepr.org/publications/dp18277
- CESifo: https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp10531.pdf
- ECONtribute: https://www.econtribute.de/RePEc/ajk/ajkdps/ECONtribute_241_2023.pdf
- IZA – Institute of Labor Economics https://docs.iza.org/dp16291.pdf
Link to the article in the Digital Research Magazine
https://www.digital.uni-passau.de/en/beitraege/2023/study-on-the-spanish-flu
Text: Kathrin Haimerl