Do Autocrats Respond to Citizen Demands? Petitions and Housing Construction in the GDR

Abstract

Do autocrats strategically respond to citizen demands to ensure regime survival? To answer this question, we assemble a novel panel of housing-related petitions to the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in combination with data on housing construction between 1945 -1989. Exploiting the timing of the largest GDR housing program, we employ a difference-in-differences design to show that the housing program was targeted at regions with higher rates of petitioning. We then demonstrate that strategic concerns about regime survival drove responsiveness. We show that the regime was more responsive to petitions from counties with export industries and counties with high collective action potential. Finally, we show that responsiveness lastingly impacts regime support. In the first democratic elections after the demise of the GDR, the authoritarian successor party received more votes in regions targeted by the housing program.

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“…Autocrats attempted to placate them through lower food prices, subsidized employment in bloated civil services and sheltered industries, and, most important for built environments, new state-funded housing (Croese and Pitcher 2019). Housing has been an especially central element of autocratic distribution in many contexts (Albertus et al 2019, Hilbig et al 2023: it serves as a highly targetable, high-value private patronage good that creates dependency on the state among recipients (Pitcher 2017).…”

“…For example, in an historical account of East German state housing -famous for massive, gridded apartment blocks -de Graaf (2017, 41) highlights that "the urban plan [became] a reflection of industrial logistics" rather than political preferences. Satiating demand for housing was a central political priority of the GDR (Hilbig et al 2023), and the regime may well have benefitted from making recipients more legible, but the "crane [was] the main architect" of these projects, with decisions about how to space new units determined by considerations like the turning radii of the cranes used for construction (de Graaf 2017, 41), facilitating mass production on the cheap.…”