Facism and Nazism developed out of a general crisis of the European political system connected with the rise of the mass participation state from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War I. The mass participation state was marked by five features: an unprecedented expansion of the number of voters brought on by universal manhood suffrage and in some cases by the extension of the vote to women; the development of mass communications; a high degree of mass mobilization, initially by revolutionary socialist parties; new economic and social demands put forward by democratic and revolutionary organizations; and fragmented, poorly organized middle-class political party structures, largely legacies of the nineteenth-century restricted franchise. Fascism was motivated by deep-seated fears of social and political disintegration and of political revolution on the part of both ruling elites and large sectors of the middle and lower-middle classes. These classes had little to gain from a socialist revolution. Fascist and Nazi movements appeared throughout Europe during the period between World Wars I and II, but only in Italy and Germany did they come to power and develop into regimes.
