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

区域认同的起源和后果。

• 批准号: 415959381
• 负责人: Dr. Fabian Wahl
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Ausschuss für Bildung, Forschung und Technikfolgenabschätzung
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Priority Programmes
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/415959381?language=en
• 关键词: Origins; Consequences; Regional; Identity.; Evidence

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.

该项目以实证的方式研究了区域身份的历史根源及其对国际贸易，欧盟，联邦制或移民等问题的政治态度的影响。本文提出的假设是，生活在历史上属于许多不同国家的地区的人，比生活在历史上属于稳定国家的地区的人，其地区认同感更弱。因此，历史经验对于理解当前的区域特征至关重要。我们假设，历史经验通过态度和偏好的代际传递影响区域认同，这反过来又塑造了期望，这决定了创新性，合作能力和兴趣以及金融行为（例如，投资者的投资偏好）。此外，随着时间的推移，区域特征也通过当地方言、仪式和传统得以保留。 德国是一个适合研究这个问题的国家，因为从历史上看，当代德国地区的特点是一个独特的高水平的政治分裂与数百个国家存在于一个松散的政治联邦称为神圣罗马帝国。一方面，区域认同是使用欧洲价值观调查（EVS）的调查数据来衡量的。 但是，由于这些调查问题只涉及身份的一个方面，并且只适用于较大的空间单位，我们也将进行自己的在线和电话调查。此外，我们将使用某些具有区域参考的街道名称的频率，以及每个城市的“旧县汽车牌照”（Altkreis-Autokennzeichen）的数量，作为揭示区域身份的措施。作为历史政治不稳定性和分裂的度量，我们将计算德国某个地区或网格单元内不同历史国家的数量。我们从当今德国地区历史领土的数字化地图中获得这些数据，利用这些数据，我们希望评估历史上的政治不稳定和分裂是否决定了当前的历史区域身份，以及这些区域身份如何影响总体经济成果，如创新或贸易，以及金融和行为以及政治偏好。 为了确定历史政治稳定对区域认同的因果影响，我们希望利用有关历史国家消失原因的知识。我们可以利用这样一个事实，即许多国家不复存在，主要是由于外部/特殊的原因，如没有男性继承人的统治者去世。