Political Activism in the former German Democratic Republic
About the author: Hans Lueders is a Stanford PhD candidate in political science and recipient of an FSI Research Grant, which he used in support of his travel to conduct field research in Germany.
Financial support from FSI allowed to me conduct archival research at the German Federal Archives in Berlin and thus supported the creation of the first and most detailed database of political activism in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). This database is a key component of my dissertation on the political consequences of domestic migration in Germany. Recent research suggests that domestic migrants have better skills, higher income, and more human capital than non-migrants. Since citizens with higher socioeconomic status participate more actively in civil society and politics, it stands to reason that domestic migration reduces civil society participation and local political activism in sending areas, while it may increase activism in in-migration areas. Yet, even though domestic migration flows are large, no one has studied the consequences of domestic migration for civil society or politics. What happens to civil society in sending areas when migrants exit? How does migration redistribute political capital in a country?
I answer this question in the context of Germany by gathering both historical and contemporary data on civil society participation in East and West Germany before and after reunification. The main obstacle to building a measure of civil society participation in the former GDR is that conventional indicators of voluntary activism are not useful in this. To address this challenge, I collected information on the number and content of petitions submitted to the GDR’s government by district of origin and year. Information on local petition activity is uniquely suited to measuring voluntary civil society activism in an authoritarian country where other forms of civil society participation were banned.
I spent six weeks in early 2019 in Berlin to collect the relevant data at the German Federal Archives. The GDR’s government produced annual statistics about the number and content of petitions submitted to various government institutions, most notably the State Council, the Council of Ministers, and the People’s Chamber. I was able to find the petition statistics in formerly classified documents stored at the Archives. As the data are available in print only, I had to take photos of a large number of pages. I then sent these photos to a company in Kenya, where they were digitized and turned into Excel files. These files had to be cleaned and combined. I hired freelancers online to complete this task.
We are still working on assembling the petition statistics for the last few years, but once the data is complete, they will offer unique insights into everyday life of East Germans behind the Iron Curtain: what issues did they complain about? What were their grievances? How does the type and content of complaints vary over time and space? And, how did domestic migration and the redistribution of politically active citizens impact civil society activism in the former GDR? Thanks to FSI’s small grant, I will soon be able to answer these questions and contribute to our understanding of politics in a one-party socialist dictatorship.
