Cultural transmission versus perceptions of the economy - The sources of political elites' economic values in the United Germany

The formal division of Germany in 1949 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 demarcate a monumental quasi-experiment. Whereas the political culture aspects of this experiment have been studied extensively, the implications of these events for the economic culture in West and East Germany have received less attention. This article attempts to fill this gap in scholarship by examining the basic economic values of parliamentarians in East and West Germany. To this end, I interviewed 168 parliamentarians from the united Parliament in Berlin (79 from the East, 89 from the West). The study finds that the socialist order successfully imbued East MPs with socialist economic values-especially among the postwar cohort-independent of MPs' evaluation of contemporary economic conditions. In contrast, West MPs' economic values reflect the social market system of the West German economy. These results suggest that basic institutional arrangements, once put into place, have a substantial influence on individuals' ideological predispositions.