The Sociology of Nazism

In a previous paper, we tested a number of critical hypotheses derived from the three principal explanations of the sociology of Nazism. Our major finding was that the mass society, lower middle-class party of protest, and political confessionalism theses are empirically flawed. In this article, we apply an interest-based theory to the sociology of blue-collar Nazism. Using a sample of 15,006 workers who joined the Nazi Party between 1925 and 1932, we test the validity of our interest-based theory. The data demonstrate significant support for an interest-based account of Nazi Party working-class joining.