Exit and Voice: Germany, 1848-1933

Albert Hirschman famously hypothesized that more exit leads to less voice. We test this conjecture in the context of Germany. In the five years that followed the failed revolutions of 1848, more than one million Germans emigrated to the United States. We explore the political consequences of this exodus. We show that differently from other waves of German emigration to the US that took place either earlier or later and were economically rather than politically motivated, “revolutionary” emigration significantly affected the political evolution of Germany over the course of 80 years, culminating in the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Specifically, a one-standard deviation in emigration rates between 1849 and 1854 in a German town or county is associated with an increase in the share of votes for the Nazi Party between 0.1 to 0.3 standard deviations. We show that both the emigration of ordinary citizens and of prominent political leaders mattered, and that selective entry and exit of local newspapers on ideological grounds, as well as the presence and composition of social clubs, are likely mechanisms behind our results.