Sudden Revolution or Long Turn? A Sociological Analysis of die GDR and its Decline using Eingabenstatistiken between 1970 and 1989.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ulrich Kohler
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2014 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 267795588

A large proportion of the GDR citizens were dissatisfied with the living conditions in their country for a long time period. Nevertheless, the revolution of 1989/90 came as a surprise to the majority. In science, too, the opinion has been held that 1989/90 happened spontaneously. But societal changes of such extent are generally based on long-term processes. As these long-term processes have not been studied so far by means of quantitative empirical social research, the project "Spontaneous Revolution or Long Turn" started to examine them in November 2014. The project compiled the "Potsdam Grievance Statistics File" containing administrative data about the frequencies of grievances between 1970 and 1989. Using the PGSF the project studies evolutions in quality of life, participation and value orientations, and links these evolutions to the events of 1989/90. In addition to the study of alternative theories on the downfall of the GDR the project has improved the problematic data situation of the GDR. The PGSF expands possibilities for quantitative descriptions of the GDR society, for example in research fields like social inequality, education or delinquency. The extension of the project has three goals. The first is to enrich the PGSF with information that could not been added to the data so far. The second goal is to finalize analyses of the PGSF delayed due to unexpected problems in the data collection phase of the previous project. The proposed papers examine, if and how changes in quality of life, participation and in value orientations contribute to the downfall of the GDR in 1989/90. Thirdly the project proposes a survey of former GDR citizens to collect retrospective information on individual grievance behaviour. The individual data is necessary to investigate under which circumstances GDR citizens used Eingaben as an instrument to communicate with the regime. Furthermore the data will ease analyses about burdens and restrictions of the Eingabewesen. This step is organized in cooperation with the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW). This guarantees access to the sample C of the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP), which is well designed for our purposes. Above all, it offers a reasonable compromise between high data quality and cost aspects.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants