Applied Economics Lunch Seminar

Du 01/10/2024 de 12:30 à 13:30

R221

WACH Oliver (Freie Universität Berlin)

Building Socialism on Abandoned Land: Collectivization and Civic Engagement in Poland

This article examines the long-term impact of collectivized agriculture in Poland on civic engagement and political preferences. Contrary to the belief that socialism eroded social capital, my findings indicate a positive legacy of collectivized farming on contemporary social capital and left-wing political leanings. For identification purposes I exploit the historical fact that collectivization was more successful on areas that experienced the deportation of the ethnic minorities between 1944 and 1947 and employ an instrumental variable and regression discontinuity approach. An alternative instrumental approach that exploits spatial variation in the 1944 land reform confirms the results. I provide evidence that places with collective farms became the center of village social life and developed a distinct culture. Furthermore, this study utilizes new datasets from interwar and socialist Poland and introduces a novel municipal crosswalk enabling consistent historical analysis with data from century of Polish history.