A Glimpse of Freedom: Allied Occupation and Political Resistance in East Germany

Abstract

This paper studies costly political resistance in a non-democracy. When Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, 40% of the designated Soviet occupation zone was initially captured by the western Allied Expeditionary Force. This occupation was short-lived: Soviet forces took over after less than two months and installed an authoritarian regime in what became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We exploit the idiosyncratic line of contact separating Allied and Soviet troops within the GDR to show that areas briefly under Allied occupation had higher incidence of protests during the only major episode of political unrest in the GDR before its demise in 1989 -the East German Uprising of 1953. These areas also exhibited lower regime support during the last free elections in 1946. We argue that even a "glimpse of freedom" can foster civilian opposition to dictatorship.

Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building

“…Policymakers viewed the national language as a key vehicle to socialize Indonesia's national identity. 8 In 1928, nationalists at the Second All-Indonesian Youth Congress drafted a statement of unity opposing the Dutch. They pledged allegiance to Indonesia as "satu nusa, satu bangsa, satu bahasa" (one fatherland, one nation, one language).…”

Unity in Diversity? How Intergroup Contact Can Foster Nation Building

“…(ii) What is your primary language used at home? 17 That there are two questions about language in a short-form Census questionnaire is indicative of how important it is to the government. In Transmigration villages, 97.2 percent are able to speak Indonesian, but only 15.4 percent use it as their primary language at home.…”

Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

“…Prior work has demonstrated the role of economic conditions, political repression, exclusion of racial, ethnic, or economic minorities, use of force, (mis)information campaigns and social media in explaining when and where protests (Steinert-Threlkeld, 2017;Chyzh and Labzina, 2018;Justino and Martorano, 2019;Fergusson and Molina, 2020;Martinez, Jessen and Xu, 2020;Manacorda and Tesei, 2020), riots (Sullivan, 2019;Hsiao and Radnitz, 2020), violence (Müller and Schwarz, 2020), and armed opposition movements emerge (Oppenheim et al, 2015;Dippel and Heblich, 2021). A significant body of research has also provided evidence that these instances of collective action have affected political reforms (Tarrow, 1994;Rasler, 1996;Kurzman, 1996;Chenoweth and Stephan, 2008;Gillion, 2013;Andrews and Gaby, 2015;Klein and Regan, 2018;De Vogel, 2020), voting patterns (Wasow, 2020;Enos, Kaufman and Sands, 2019;Larreboure and González, 2019), social attitudes and cohesion (Branton et al, 2015;Muñoz and Anduiza, 2019;Mazumder, 2019), and economic activity.…”