The Potsdam Grievance Statistics File. New data on quality of life and political participation for the German Democratic Republic 1970–1989

Abstract

The newly collected "Potsdam Grievance Statistics File" (PGSF) holds data on the number and topics of grievances ("Eingaben") that were addressed to local authorities of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the years 1970 to 1989. The PGSF allows quantitative analyses on topics such as participation, quality of life, and value change in the German Democratic Republic. This paper introduces the concepts of the data set and discusses the validity of its contents.

Environmental Pollution and Authoritarian Politics

“…This institution was designed to learn about citizens' grievances while preventing the emergence of an organized opposition (Zatlin 1997). Our data on complaint letters come from the Potsdam Grievance Statistic File (Class, Kohler, and Krawietz 2018). Collected from previously classified documents, this data set includes information on the number of letters by topic and time period across 184 counties in the GDR between 1980 and 1988.…”

Political Imprisonment and Protest Mobilization: Evidence From the GDR

“…Third, we draw on fine-grained records of citizen grievance letters in 1984 to substitute OVs. East German citizens had the opportunity to air their discontent by writing grievance letters (Eingaben) to the regime (Class, Kohler, and Krawietz, 2018). The analyses' results using these alternative proxies of latent dissent are listed in the Appendix, Table A.4.…”

“…2. CIRI Human Rights Data reports no other physical integrity rights violations throughout our observation period in Germany, apart from a limited amount of torture in 1988 (Cingranelli and Richards, 2014). However, these incidents of torture occurred in the context of political imprisonment (Spohr, 2015).…”

Electoral Responsiveness in Closed Autocracies: Evidence from Petitions in the former German Democratic Republic

“…East Germans made extensive use of this system. They submitted between half (Class, Kohler, and Krawietz 2018) and one million (Mühlberg 2004) petitions every year, equaling up to 8.1% of the East German electorate. Given that most petitions were written on behalf of households or neighborhood associations, the true share of the population writing a petition was even higher.…”

“…East Germans made extensive use of this system. They wrote between half (Class, Kohler, and Krawietz 2018) and one million (Mühlberg 2004) petitions every year, equaling up to 8.1% of the country’s electorate. As the breadth of topics covered in these petitions demonstrates, they were not unlike 311 calls 2 (Christensen and Ejdemyr 2020), pothole complaints (Burnett and Kogan 2016), or “FixMyStreet” requests (Dipoppa and Grossman 2020; Sjoberg, Mellon, and Peixoto 2017) in democracies.…”