Long-term evidence of retrospective voting: A natural experiment from the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

The paper investigates long-lasting electoral punishment. Decades of communist socialization and the repressive rule of a single-party have left their left-wing fingerprint on East Germany. In this paper we show that voters act rationally: given negative life circumstances experienced under the rule of the communist party, they display retrospective voting even decades later. Our insight is based on the analysis of 19 years of revealed and stated party preferences. We argue that life at the Border Region to West Germany was particularly hard and find that East German voters who lived close to the inner-German border before the reunification of the two states are 5.9 percentage points less likely to lean toward the successor party to East Germany’s communists. Given that over the years roughly every fifth person has revealed preferences for the communists in the East, this translates to over thirty percent reduction. We confirm the preferences with administrative data: The electoral punishment estimated at the district-level amounts to a reduction of 1.3 percentage points of votes for the party.