Origins and Consequences of Regional Identity. Evidence from Historical Differences in Political Instability and Fragmentation among German States

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This project empirically investigates the historical roots of regional identities and their consequences on political attitudes towards issues like international trade, the European Union, federalism or migration. The hypothesis advanced in the paper is that people living in regions that historically belonged to a lot of different states have a weaker regional identity than people living in regions with a stable state history. Thus, historical experiences should matter for the understanding of current regional identities. We hypothesize that historical experiences influence regional identity via the intergenerational transmission of attitudes and preferences, which in turn shape expectations, which determine innovativeness, ability and interest to cooperate and financial behavior (e.g., a home bias of investors). Furthermore, regional identities are also preserved over time through local dialects, rituals and traditions. Germany is a suitable country for studying this as historically, the area of contemporary Germany was characterized by a uniquely high level of political fragmentation with several hundreds of states existing in a loose political federation called the Holy Roman Empire.On the one hand, regional identity is measured using survey data from the European Values Survey (EVS). But, as these survey questions are only covering one aspect of identity and are available only for larger spatial units we will also conduct our own, online and telephone based survey. Furthermore, we will use the frequency of certain street names with regional reference, as well as the number of ``old county car license plates'' (Altkreis-Autokennzeichen) in each municipality, as measures of revealed regional identity. As measures of historical political instability and fragmentation we, for example, will compute the number of different historical states within a certain region or grid cell in Germany. We obtain them from digitized maps of historical territories in the area of today's Germany.Using this data, we want to assess whether historical political instability and fragmentation determined current historical regional identities and, as a next step how these regional identities influence aggregated economic outcomes like innovativeness or trade but also financial and behavior and political preferences. To identify the causal effect of historical political stability on regional identities, we want to exploit knowledge about the reasons why historical states disappeared. We can utilize the fact that many of the states ceased to exist due to largely exogenous/ idiosyncratic reasons like the death of the ruler without a male heir.