Featured Graduate Student Research: Hans Lueders

Measuring Civil Society Participation in the former German Democratic Republic

Recent research suggests that domestic migrants have better skills, higher income, and more human capital than non-migrants. Since citizens with higher socio-economic 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. 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?

My dissertation leverages historical and contemporary data to study civil society participation and political activism in Germany. Germany is an ideal case to study domestic migration and civil society because it allows me to examine cross-regime, cross-temporal, and cross-regional variation in both my dependent and independent variables. Every year, more than three million Germans (c. 3.75% of the population) move from one municipality to another. Similarly, about 400,000 (c. 2.5% of the population) East Germans moved across municipality borders every year despite the GDR government’s tight controls over employment and housing. In addition, millions of East Germans left the GDR before the construction of the Berlin Wall as well as around its fall.

The GDR was a socialist one-party dictatorship that did not allow for freedom of speech, association, or assembly. Elections were not free. Studying the impact of domestic migration on civil society participation in the GDR is thus challenging. Conventional measures such as membership in civil society organizations, associational life, or electoral turnout are readily available for contemporary Germany as well as West Germany before reunification. But these measures are not useful to study civil society in the GDR because they do not reflect voluntary civil society activities in an authoritarian context. My research thus has to rely on alternative measures.

Citizens in the GDR could not freely express their demands or grievances in elections or public opinion polls. However, petitions (Eingaben) constituted an important avenue through which citizens were able to provide crucial information about their grievances to the government. Every year, East Germans submitted hundreds of thousands of petitions to local and national authorities. Some of them were about supply shortages or the poor quality of local public goods and services. Others, in turn, drew attention to the lack of responsiveness of local authorities. These examples emphasize that petitions were a way for GDR citizens to issue complaints to the government on behalf of their communities and to hold local authorities accountable. Consequently, information on the number of petitions submitted to East German authorities by district and year is uniquely suited to measuring civil society participation in an authoritarian context where other forms of civil society activism were banned. My theory suggests that domestic migration should decrease the number of petitions submitted from sending areas over time.

Figure 1: Number of complaints to the State Council in 1984, by district in Berlin

The government of the former German Democratic Republic took citizens’ complaints very seriously. GDR authorities were highly concerned about popular grievances and tried to respond to as many of them as possible in order to appease the population and preempt potential unrest.
In order to respond to the large volumne of complaints in an efficient manner, the GDR authorities created detailed statistics about the origin, type, and content of complaint sent to various government agencies. These statistics were declassified after the demise of socialist one-party rule
in East Germany and are accessible for researchers at the German Federal Archives.

Data collection in Berlin

Unfortunately, the data are only available in print. A research trip to Berlin (January and February 2019) was therefore necessary in order to retrieve the relevant information. Information on the number of petitions submitted to the State Council—the institution that, due to its political
importance as top decision-making authority, received most petitions—were available in internal statistics, which I took photos of. Figure 1 presents a sample photo of these statistics. It depicts information on the number and content of petitions submitted from citizens in Berlin in 1984.

I was also able to purchase a data set of petitions submitted to the Council of Ministers from mid-1988 until German reunification. Lastly, I created a data set of all petitions submitted to the People’s Chamber—the GDR’s legislative body—by manually entering more than 10,000 petitions and coding their content, year, district of origin, and basic demographic information about the sender.

Yet, taking photos of the petition statistics and entering information on some of them manually was only the first step. In a next step, the photos had to be digitized and converted into Excel files. Hewani Data (Nairobi, Kenya), assisted me with this crucial step. Finally, I used part of my
Europe Center grant to pay for undergraduate research assistants and freelancers on upwork.com to help me combine the individual files and create a data base of petitions—and thus civil society activism—in the former German Democratic Republic.

I further collected information on all elections in the former GDR. The data emphasize that GDR elections were not competitive. Almost every GDR citizen turned out to vote, and almost every voter voted in favor of the state party. Yet, while there was little variation in turnout
and support for the ruling Socialist Unity Party across districts in the GDR, we find substantial variation in complaint activity—which supports my argument that complaints are a better proxy for civil society participation in an authoritarian context. Naturally, domestic migration is not
the only factor impacting civil society or petition writing in a particular district. Therefore, I also collected important alternative explanations for civil society activism. More specifically, I found information on infant mortality rates, industrial composition, and other potential sources of popular grievances at the archives.

Together, the data 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 financial support from the Europe Center, I will soon be able to answer these questions, contribute to our understanding of politics in a socialist one-party regime, and shed light on the
political consequences of domestic migration in Germany.

Hans Lueders is a PhD candidate in Political Science.