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A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Hälbig, Mirja C.; Lorenz, Jürgen R. Conference Paper How Stalin and Roosevelt influenced the Federal Elections in 2017 East Germany Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2019: 30 Jahre Mauerfall - Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft - Session: Economic History II, No. D07-V1 Provided in Cooperation with: Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association Suggested Citation: Hälbig, Mirja C.; Lorenz, Jürgen R. (2019) : How Stalin and Roosevelt influenced the Federal Elections in 2017 East Germany, Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2019: 30 Jahre Mauerfall - Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft - Session: Economic History II, No. D07-V1, ZBW - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, Kiel, Hamburg This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/203618 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 How Stalin and Roosevelt influenced the Federal Elections in 2017 East Germany∗ Mirja C. Hälbig y Jürgen R. Lorenz z September 15, 2019 – WORKING DRAFT – Abstract Exploiting differences in occupation status in East Germany in the last days of World War II and shortly thereafter, we find that regions which – due to their occupation status – experienced a drastic supply problem caused by the influx of great numbers of refugees fleeing from the Red Army in 1945 had a disproportionate increase in AfD votes from 2013 to 2017. We conclude that the "refugee crisis" in 2015, which dominated the campaign of the federal elections in 2017 and is considered as main determinant of voting for the AfD, activated the collective memory of this long-gone historic event and thereby shaped the current political landscape. 1 Introduction As in countries all over the globe, right-wing populism is on the rise in Germany. The german right-wing populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), was founded in 2013 initially as a Euro-sceptic party under the leadership of some prominent economists. When Germany experienced a seemingly unprecedented influx of refugees mostly from civil war country Syria in 2015, the AfD moved further to the right and along went the social discourse and political dialogue. ∗For very helpful comments and discussions we would like to thank Johanna Gereke, Frank Simmen and Bernd Süßmuth and the participants of the 6th Bamberg-Halle-Jena-Leipzig Work- shop. Furthermore we are very grateful to Davide Cantoni for kindly providing us with his data of the ARD TV reception in the former GDR and J. Christian Heide for his ongoing support not only in technical matters. yHalle Institute for Economic Research (IWH), Member of the Leibniz Association, [email protected] zMarburg University, Leipzig University 1 Opinion polls found the most important concern of (potential) AfD voters to be the handling of the "refugee crisis" by the government (Forschungsgruppe Wahlen e.V. 2017, Vehrkamp and Wratil 2017). Especially in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), the AfD ex- perienced large vote gains both in local and federal elections. However, there is huge variation in AfD vote shares within Eastern Germany, which ranged from 13% in the constituency of Potsdam (Brandenburg) to 35% in the constituency Sächsische-Schweiz/Osterzgebirge (Saxony) in the federal elections in 2017. Sax- ony, especially its south-eastern parts, were the political heartland of the AfD in 2017 (see figure 1). Bundestagswahl 2017 AfD Endgültiges Ergebnis 4,9 11,0 17,2 23,3 29,4 35,5 © Der Bundeswahlleiter, Statistisches Bundesamt, Wiesbaden 2017. Geoinformationen: © Geobasis-DE / BKG (2016) Figure 1: AfD vote shares by constituency, federal elections 2017. The area in east and south Saxony exhibits the highest AfD vote share. URL: https://www. bundeswahlleiter.de/bundestagswahlen/2017/ergebnisse/wahlatlas.html. In recent years, a vast literature dedicated to explaining the differences in susceptibility to right-wing populism developed. However, most studies on right- wing populist vote and negative attitudes towards migration focus on current determinants, such as labor market conditions (Mayda 2006), the welfare state (Facchini and Mayda 2009), contact with foreigners (Steinmayr 2016), perceived cultural threats (Dilger and Lengfeld 2018), and social capital (Rydgren 2009). These studies, however, ignore historic roots of attitudes and beliefs still shaping present day outcomes.1 In recent years, a strand of literature argues that long gone historical events can shape present day attitudes and with that political 1 Interestingly, Franz et al. (2018) show that AfD vote shares are higher in overaged regions with low population density. Using only current determinants for AfD votes, however, they find that their model underestimates the voting share of the AfD in Saxony considerably. 2 and economic outcomes, either via path dependency in the evolution of institu- tions and by altering the structure and organization of society (Acemoglu et al. 2001, Glaeser and Shleifer 2002, Dell 2010, Acemoglu et al. 2011 and Hornbeck and Naidu 2014) or via directly influencing cultural norms, attitudes and beliefs (Nunn and Wantchekon 2011, Becker et al. 2016, Guiso et al. 2016, Fouka and Voth 2016). Regarding the historical roots of political attitudes, Voigtländer and Voth (2012) find regional persistence in anti-semitism in Germany dating back to medieval times. Black Death Pogroms are found to predict higher levels of anti-semitism and NSDAP vote shares in the 1920s and 1930s. In a recent pa- per, Cantoni et al. (2019) find that AfD votes in the federal elections in 2017 are correlated with NSDAP votes in 1928-1933. Acharya et al. (2016) show that contemporary regional differences in attitudes towards blacks and political pref- erence in the American South are partly explained by the prevalence of slavery in 1860. Ochsner and Roesel (2016) show that regions which experienced an in- flux of Nazis fleeing from the Soviet takeover of parts of Upper Austria after the second world war have a higher share of right-wing populist votes in the present. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) with the World War II battlefront along the "Gothic Line" as geographic divide, Fontana et al. (2017) find that the Communist Party gained votes in post-war Italy in regions especially exposed to the civil war. Avdeenko and Siedler (2017) show that the persistence of cultural traits and political attitudes is ensured by the intergenerational transmission of values and beliefs, for example within family. While the above mentioned studies assume those historically shaped attitudes to be throughout present and relevant for present political and economic decision making, recent literature indicates that the memory of long gone historic events can come to light after years or decades of being mostly irrelevant. Fisman et al. (2014) find that stock markets reacted to the fact that the Japanese government reauthorized the use of a history textbook in 2005 that, according to critics, white- washed Japanese war crimes in occupied China in the 1940s, and was followed by Chinese protests and severe disputes over Japanese crimes in World War II. Fouka and Voth (2016) show that German car sales declined more drastically in Greek regions where Nazi troops committed war crimes in World War II when tensions between Greece and Germany rose during the Financial Crisis. Similarly, Ochsner and Roesel (2017) provide anecdotal and statistical evidence that tar- geted political campaigning can trigger the collective memory of historical events and thereby influence political preferences. When the Austrian populist party FPÖ began its anti-Turkish campaign in 2005 recalling the historical experience of Turkish related atrocities in the wake of the sieges of Vienna in 1529/1683, municipalities that were subject to war related events in those days experienced 3 a more pronounced increase in FPÖ vote shares than those unaffected by the Turkish invasion. Our study fits in with previous analyses on the historic roots of differences in attitudes and beliefs coming to light after decades of being irrelevant. We argue that the especially sharp increase in AfD vote shares in southern and eastern Saxony from 2013 to 2017 can be traced back to events dating back to the last days of World War II: In these last days, there was a strip of territory in southern Saxony still left unoccupied by both American and Soviet troops. But even after hostilities