close
Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Feb 28;24(1):97-119.
doi: 10.1515/ger-2022-0042. Epub 2023 Feb 24.

Good Bye Lenin Revisited: East-West Preferences Three Decades after German Reunification

Mariia Bondar  1 , Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln  2
Affiliations

Good Bye Lenin Revisited: East-West Preferences Three Decades after German Reunification

Mariia Bondar et al. Ger Econ Rev. .

Abstract

In this paper, we document that living under Communism versus Capitalism has lasting effects on preferences for a strong government. Relying on the natural experiment of German reunification and extending the analysis of Alesina and Fuchs-Schündeln (2007), we show that East Germans still have stronger preferences for redistribution than West Germans 27 years after reunification. While convergence of preferences occurs, the speed of convergence decreases significantly over time. Evidence from cohorts born after German reunification points towards significant intergenerational transmission of preferences.

Keywords: German reunification; endogenous preferences; preferences for redistribution.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Fraction of the respondents from West and East who believe that the financial security is the responsibility of the state. Unbalanced sample.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Alesina A., Fuchs-Schündeln N. Good-bye Lenin (or not?): The Effect of Communism on People’s Preferences. The American Economic Review. 2007;97(4):1507–28. doi: 10.1257/aer.97.4.1507. - DOI
    1. Alesina A., Giuliano P. Handbook of Social Economics . Vol. 1. North-Holland: Elsevier; 2011. Chapter 4 – Preferences for Redistribution; pp. 93–131.
    1. Alesina A., La Ferrara E. Preferences for Redistribution in the Land of Opportunities. Journal of Public Economics. 2005;89(5):897–931. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2004.05.009. - DOI
    1. Avdeenko A. Long-term Evidence of Retrospective Voting: A Natural Experiment from the German Democratic Republic. European Economic Review. 2018;103:83–107.
    1. Avdeenko A., Siedler T. Intergenerational Correlations of Extreme Right-Wing Party Preferences and Attitudes toward Immigration. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics. 2017;119(3):768–800. doi: 10.1111/sjoe.12190. - DOI

LinkOut - more resources