The Legacy of State Socialism on Attitudes toward Immigration

Abstract

Does the politico-economic system affect preferences for immigration? In this study, I show that individuals exposed to life under state socialism have formed, and persistently hold different attitudes toward immigration. By exploiting the natural experiment of the division and reunification of Germany, I estimate the effect of state socialism on various measures of attitudes toward immigration. Drawing on rich individual panel data, I find that East Germans who lived under state socialism, are 12.9 percent more likely to oppose immigration than West Germans who spent their entire life in a democratic, capitalist country. The effect is persistent over time and across space, and largest for cohorts born and raised under state socialism. This gap in attitudes is not driven by individuals' experiences in the transition years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but instead can be traced back to a longer-term deterioration in trust. Evidence relating to members of a group that opposed the authoritarian system highlights the importance of state socialist ideology for attitude formation.

Keywords: state socialism, politico-economic regime, attitudes toward immigration, natural experiment

JEL Classification: P20, P51, N34, Z10