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On 30 January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. He did not take power in a coup or by winning an electoral majority. The Nazi party’s best result in a free national election was 37.3 percent, in July 1932. He was appointed constitutionally by President Paul von Hindenburg, on the advice of conservative politicians who believed they could control him. Within eighteen months, Weimar democracy had been destroyed.
For political scientists, Weimar is not just a historical tragedy. It is the defining case in the study of democratic breakdown, and almost every theory of how democracies die has been tested against it. This essay sets out the main explanations and what remains disputed.
Structural explanations: a republic under strain
The first group of explanations focuses on conditions the republic could not escape.
Its origins. The republic was founded in defeat in 1918–19 and was linked from the start, in the eyes of its enemies, with the Versailles Treaty and the “stab-in-the-back” myth. Large parts of the elite, including the army, the civil service, the judiciary and the universities, never accepted it. Historians have called it a “republic without republicans”.
Economic shocks. The hyperinflation of 1923 wiped out middle-class savings. The Great Depression after 1929 then drove unemployment above six million by 1932. Electoral support for the Nazis grew closely in line with the economic crisis.
Institutional design. The Weimar constitution combined pure proportional representation, with no electoral threshold, and a strong, directly elected president who held emergency powers under Article 48. Proportional representation fragmented the Reichstag. Article 48 gave the presidency a way to govern without parliament. From 1930, Chancellor Heinrich Brüning governed largely by presidential decree. Karl Dietrich Bracher’s classic study, Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik (1955), placed this “presidential” phase at the centre of the collapse: parliamentary democracy had effectively ended well before Hitler took office.
Agency explanations: the role of elites
The second group of explanations, which has become dominant in comparative politics, emphasises choices.
Juan Linz (1978), in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, argued that democracies rarely fall simply because of social or economic pressures. They fall because political actors, especially those in the democratic system, fail to defend them. Linz distinguished loyal oppositions, which reject the use of force, from disloyal ones, which do not. Crucially, he also identified semi-loyal actors: parties and leaders who say they support democracy but tolerate, excuse or work with anti-democratic forces when it suits them. In Weimar, the most important semi-loyal actors were the conservative nationalists, especially Franz von Papen, Alfred Hugenberg’s DNVP and the group around Hindenburg. They brought Hitler into government believing he could be “tamed”.
Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018), in How Democracies Die, made this argument well known to a wider public. Mainstream parties, they argue, are democracy’s “gatekeepers”. Their most important duty is to keep extremists out of power, even at a cost to themselves. In 1933 the German right did the opposite. Levitsky and Ziblatt also identify two informal norms that sustain democracy: mutual toleration, accepting rivals as legitimate, and forbearance, not using legal powers to their full extent. Weimar shows what happens when both break down.
Giovanni Capoccia (2005), in Defending Democracy, compares interwar democracies that survived threats from extremists, such as Finland, Belgium and Czechoslovakia, with those that did not. He shows that democracies can protect themselves through legal measures against anti-system parties, but only if democratic politicians are willing to use them in time.
Civil society and the paradox of associations
Sheri Berman (1997) added an important complication. Influential work following Robert Putnam treated a dense civil society, with many clubs, associations and voluntary groups, as good for democracy. Berman showed that Weimar Germany had an unusually rich associational life, and that it helped the Nazis. Because the established parties were weak and unpopular, people’s energy went into nationalist, professional and local associations, which the Nazis then took over. Civil society, she concluded, strengthens democracy only when political institutions are strong enough to channel it.
What students should be careful about
Three cautions are worth keeping in mind.
First, be careful with analogies. “Weimar” is used constantly in political commentary. Not every polarised democracy is Weimar, and the comparison can hide as much as it reveals. Germany in 1932 had paramilitary armies fighting in the streets, mass unemployment and a recent world war. Few contemporary cases share all of these features.
Second, structure and agency interact. The choices Linz emphasises were made under severe pressure. Elite failure explains when and how the republic fell, but economic collapse explains why extremists had mass support in the first place.
Third, modern backsliding usually looks different. As Nancy Bermeo (2016) has shown, contemporary democracies rarely end with a single decisive event like January 1933. More often, elected leaders gradually weaken courts, the media and electoral bodies through apparently legal steps. Weimar’s lesson is less about a particular moment than about the slow loss of commitment among those who were supposed to defend democracy.
Questions for seminar discussion
- Could a different electoral system, for example one with a 5 percent threshold, have saved Weimar? Why or why not?
- Who were Weimar’s “semi-loyal” actors, and are there equivalents in democracies you study today?
- Does Berman’s argument about civil society apply to Indonesia, where mass religious organisations play a large political role?
References and further reading
- Berman, S. (1997). Civil society and the collapse of the Weimar Republic. World Politics, 49(3), 401–429.
- Bermeo, N. (2016). On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy, 27(1), 5–19.
- Bracher, K. D. (1955). Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republik: Eine Studie zum Problem des Machtverfalls in der Demokratie. Ring-Verlag.
- Capoccia, G. (2005). Defending Democracy: Reactions to Extremism in Interwar Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press.
- Evans, R. J. (2003). The Coming of the Third Reich. Allen Lane.
- Kolb, E. (2005). The Weimar Republic (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How Democracies Die. Crown.
- Linz, J. J. (1978). The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration. Johns Hopkins University Press.
