How 19th-Century Catholic Oppression Cut Support for Today's Far Right

🔎 Research Question

How can a nineteenth-century political conflict shape voting behavior more than a century later? The paper investigates whether the Prussian oppression of German Catholics produced enduring organizational mobilization that still influences support for the radical right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) today.

📚 New Historical Evidence

• Newly collected data on nineteenth-century oppression events across German regions measures variation in the intensity of anti-Catholic actions.
• Regional indicators of Catholic lay organization activity capture the subsequent mobilization of political Catholicism.

📊 Key Findings

• Regions where Catholic oppression was more intense experienced greater mobilization of Catholic lay organizations.
• Those same historically oppressed Catholic regions now show lower levels of support for the AfD.
• The observed pattern is consistent with a multigenerational transmission mechanism: an historical conflict produced durable organizational structures that shaped political behavior across generations.

🔬 How the Link Was Assessed

Analysis links region-level measures of nineteenth-century oppression to both later Catholic organizational activity and contemporary AfD vote support, using the newly assembled historical-event dataset to trace spatially differentiated long-term effects.

💡 Why It Matters

These results illuminate how specific historical political conflicts can have persistent political consequences when they trigger sustained organizational responses. The findings contribute to debates on the historical determinants of political behavior and clarify which regional context effects can weaken or strengthen the radical right.