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Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Lichter, Andreas; Löffler, Max; Siegloch, Sebastian Working Paper The long-term costs of government surveillance: Insights from Stasi spying in East Germany SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research, No. 865 Provided in Cooperation with: German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) Suggested Citation: Lichter, Andreas; Löffler, Max; Siegloch, Sebastian (2016) : The long-term costs of government surveillance: Insights from Stasi spying in East Germany, SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research, No. 865, Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW), Berlin This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/146890 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu The German Socio-Economic Panel study 865 2016 SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research SOEP — The German Socio-Economic Panel study at DIW Berlin 865-2016 The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany Andreas Lichter, Max Löffl er, Sebastian Siegloch SOEPpapers on Multidisciplinary Panel Data Research at DIW Berlin This series presents research findings based either directly on data from the German Socio- Economic Panel study (SOEP) or using SOEP data as part of an internationally comparable data set (e.g. CNEF, ECHP, LIS, LWS, CHER/PACO). SOEP is a truly multidisciplinary household panel study covering a wide range of social and behavioral sciences: economics, sociology, psychology, survey methodology, econometrics and applied statistics, educational science, political science, public health, behavioral genetics, demography, geography, and sport science. The decision to publish a submission in SOEPpapers is made by a board of editors chosen by the DIW Berlin to represent the wide range of disciplines covered by SOEP. There is no external referee process and papers are either accepted or rejected without revision. Papers appear in this series as works in progress and may also appear elsewhere. They often represent preliminary studies and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be requested from the author directly. Any opinions expressed in this series are those of the author(s) and not those of DIW Berlin. Research disseminated by DIW Berlin may include views on public policy issues, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The SOEPpapers are available at http://www.diw.de/soeppapers Editors: Jan Goebel (Spatial Economics) Martin Kroh (Political Science, Survey Methodology) Carsten Schröder (Public Economics) Jürgen Schupp (Sociology) Conchita D’Ambrosio (Public Economics, DIW Research Fellow) Denis Gerstorf (Psychology, DIW Research Director) Elke Holst (Gender Studies, DIW Research Director) Frauke Kreuter (Survey Methodology, DIW Research Fellow) Frieder R. Lang (Psychology, DIW Research Fellow) Jörg-Peter Schräpler (Survey Methodology, DIW Research Fellow) Thomas Siedler (Empirical Economics) C. Katharina Spieß ( Education and Family Economics) Gert G. Wagner (Social Sciences) ISSN: 1864-6689 (online) German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) DIW Berlin Mohrenstrasse 58 10117 Berlin, Germany Contact: Uta Rahmann | [email protected] The Long-Term Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany∗ Andreas Lichter Max Loffler¨ Sebastian Siegloch Version: August 2016 Abstract. Despite the prevalence of government surveillance systems around the world, causal evidence on their social and economic consequences is lacking. Using county-level variation in the number of Stasi informers within Socialist East Germany during the 1980s and accounting for potential endogeneity, we show that more intense regional surveillance led to lower levels of trust and reduced social activity in post-reunification Germany. We also find substantial and long-lasting economic effects of Stasi spying, resulting in lower self-employment, higher unemployment and larger out-migration throughout the 1990s and 2000s. We further show that these effects are due to surveillance and not alternative mechanisms. We argue that our findings have important implications for contemporary surveillance systems. Keywords: government surveillance, trust, social ties, East Germany JEL codes: H11, N34, N44, P20 * A. Lichter is affiliated to the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and the University of Cologne ([email protected]), M. Loffler¨ to the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and the University of Cologne (loeffl[email protected]), S. Siegloch to the University of Mannheim, IZA, ZEW and CESifo ([email protected]). A first version of this paper circulates as IZA Discussion Paper No. 9245 (July 2015). We are grateful to Jens Gieseke for sharing county-level data on official employees of the Ministry for State Security, and Davide Cantoni for sharing regional GDR data with us. We thank Felix Bierbrauer, Davide Cantoni, Antonio Ciccone, Arnaud Chevalier, Denvil Duncan, Corrado Giulietti, Mark Harrison, Johannes Hermle, Paul Hufe, Michael Krause, Andreas Peichl, Gerard Pfann, Martin Peitz, Nico Pestel, Anna Raute, Derek Stemple, Jochen Streb, Uwe Sunde, Nico Voigtlander,¨ Fabian Waldinger, Felix Weinhardt, Ludger Woßmann¨ as well as conference participants at IIPF 2015, SOLE 2016, and seminar participants at IZA Bonn, ZEW Mannheim, BeNA Berlin, and the Universities of Mannheim, Munster¨ and Bonn for valuable comments and suggestions. Felix Poge¨ and Georgios Tassoukis provided outstanding research assistance. We would also like to thank the SOEPremote team at DIW Berlin for continuous support. 1 1 Introduction More than one third of the world population lives in authoritarian states that attempt to control almost all aspects of public and private life (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2014). To these ends, those regimes install large-scale surveillance systems that infiltrate the population and generate a widespread atmosphere of suspicion reaching deep into private spheres (Arendt, 1951). Such environments of distrust are thought to have adverse economic effects, since they limit cooperation and the open exchange of ideas (Arrow, 1972, Putnam, 1995, La Porta et al., 1997, Algan and Cahuc, 2014). However, the empirical literature has not yet established a causal link between government surveillance, trust and economic performance. In this paper, we quantify the effect of government surveillance on trust, social ties and long- run economic performance. To do so, we make use of administrative data on the large network of informers who once operated in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) and link measures of regional government surveillance to post-reunification outcomes. The GDR Ministry for State Security, commonly referred to as the Stasi, administered a huge body of so-called Informelle Mitarbeiter – unofficial informers – that accounted for more than one percent of the East German population in the 1980s. The regime actually regarded its dense network of informers as the most important instrument to secure its power (Muller-Enbergs,¨ 1996, p. 305). The informers were ordinary citizens who kept their regular jobs but also secretly gathered information within their professional and social network, thus betraying the trust of friends, neighbors and colleagues (Bruce, 2010). As the informers infiltrated private spheres, the damage done to social relations is thought to be large and persistent (Gieseke, 2014, p. 95). To identify the long-term effects of surveillance, we exploit regional variation in the spying density across East German counties. An obvious concern is that the recruitment of spies across counties was non-random. We account for this non-randomness by adopting two different, complementary identification strategies. The first design exploits the specific administrative structure of the Stasi, whose county offices were subordinate to the respective state office. These state offices bore full responsibility to secure their territory and chose different strategies to do so, which led to different average levels of spying across states. Indeed, around 25% of the variation in the surveillance intensity across counties can be explained with state fixed effects. However, while surveillance policies varied across states, all economic and social policies were centrally decided by the politburo in East Berlin. This allows us
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