Industrialization and Socialist Mobilization: Evidence from the Ruhr Area

Historically, the main political reaction to the inequalities associated with the Industrial Revolution was the rise of socialist movements. As countries industrialized, structural inequalities emerge between owners and workers, which facilitated the formation of party systems divided by class. Behind this common trend, however, there is large cross-country variation. Socialist movements achieved electoral dominance in some countries but not in others. Some of them pursued violent revolutions while others remained committed to democratic reforms. We argue that the rise and radicalization of socialism ultimately originate from local or national differences in the industrialization process. The later and more rapidly this process unfolded, the greater the likelihood that industrial workers embraced radical socialism.
We examine the political consequences of local variation in the industrialization process in Germany’s Ruhr area, where the sequential adoption of coal mining enables us to identify how the timing and scale of industrial development shaped socialist mobilization. Empirically, we draw on historical newspapers to reconstruct neighborhood-level electoral returns from the early 1870s through the late Weimar Republic. Additionally, we compile new mine-level data on strike participation to analyze the conditions under which industrial workers engage in collective action to curb economic inequalities. By reconstructing the Ruhr area’s historical municipal boundaries, we further assemble an original dataset capturing local variation in mining employment, the migrant and religious composition of the workforce, and the spatial distribution of worker housing.
Our analysis first considers how the adoption of coal mining affected the rise of socialism in the German Empire in a difference-in-differences design, exploiting the staggered opening of coal mines at the district level. Second, we examine whether districts that industrialized later and more intensively were more likely to embrace radical political action to address inequality in the early twentieth century, captured via participation in the large-scale strike of 1912 and support for the Communist Party during the time of the Weimar Republic. Third, we exploit the Ruhr area’s historical confessional boundaries and mine-level migration records to ascertain how preexisting cleavages and the cultural identities of immigrants conditioned the rise of (radical) socialism. As such, we provide new insights into how preexisting social and cultural cleavages influenced whether workers articulated their political identities around demands for inequality reduction or, instead, around nationalist appeals. In doing so, the study advances our understanding of the structural origins of socialism and the evolving nature of political cleavages in advanced democracies.