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Years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the right to freedom of expression remains less important to Germans who lived in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) than to their West German counterparts. These are the findings of a study by economists from the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg and the University of Groningen.

The longer people lived in the GDR, the greater the difference is, the analysis showed. In contrast, there are no obvious east-west differences among people born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The study was published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.

The authors, Dr. Olga Popova (IOS) and Prof. Dr. Milena Nikolova (University of Groningen), approached the division and later reunification of Germany as a natural experiment to investigate the long-term effects of socialism on individual freedom of speech values.

They analyzed data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) from longitudinal surveys, involving the same people in 1996, 2006, and 2016, as well as data from the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) covering 1991 to 2018.

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