How Petitions Shaped Housing Allocation in East Germany

📌 What Citizens Asked

Citizens in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) submitted frequent housing-related petitions to the state. The central question is whether those petitions produced tangible improvements in livelihoods by influencing where new housing was built.

🧭 New Records Compiled

• A novel panel of housing-related petitions sent to the GDR government
• Administrative records of all housing constructed in the GDR between 1945 and 1989

🔎 How Responsiveness Was Identified

• Exploits the timing of the largest GDR housing program in 1971
• Employs a difference-in-differences design comparing regions with different petition rates before and after 1971
• Uses a variance decomposition method to benchmark the importance of petitions against objective indicators of housing need

📊 Key Findings

• Construction was targeted at regions with higher rates of petitioning following the 1971 program
• Variance decomposition indicates that petitions explain a meaningful share of allocation variation relative to objective need indicators
• Overall, petitions allowed citizens to meaningfully influence the allocation of public resources

🔥 Why It Matters

The evidence challenges assumptions that authoritarian states systematically ignore citizen input. Demonstrating that petitions in the GDR led to concrete housing outcomes contributes to nascent scholarship on responsiveness in non-democratic regimes and shows that citizen voice can produce real improvements in livelihoods.