Abstract:
A growing literature concerns the role of symbolic politics, including how political parties benefit electorally from politicizing the past, a strategy which should be more effective in localities with physical memories of the past. We test this argument by studying the effect of the local concentration of pre-Christian monuments on electoral support for the Danish Nazi Party -- a far-right party who relied heavily on the symbols of Denmark's pre-Christian past in its propaganda -- in Danish parliamentary elections 1935-1943. In contrast to the proposed theoretical argument, we find no evidence that Danish localities with a greater concentration of pre-Christian monuments saw greater electoral support for the Danish Nazi Party. These findings hint at the limits of symbolic politics for electoral support for the far-right and suggest that investigating the scope conditions for the political effects of physical memories of the past may be a fruitful avenue for future research.
