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

该项目对区域认同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进行了实证研究。文中提出的假设是，生活在历史上属于许多不同国家的地区的人比生活在具有稳定国家历史的地区的人具有更弱的地区认同感。因此，历史经验对于理解当前的区域身份应该很重要。我们假设，历史经验通过态度和偏好的代际传递影响地区认同，而态度和偏好又塑造了预期，而预期又决定了创新能力、合作能力和兴趣以及金融行为(例如，投资者的本土偏见)。此外，随着时间的推移，通过当地方言、仪式和传统，区域特性也得到了保留。德国是一个适合研究这一问题的国家，因为从历史上看，当代德国地区的特点是政治高度分裂，数百个州存在于一个被称为神圣罗马帝国的松散政治联邦中。一方面，地区认同感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，我们也将进行我们自己的、在线的和基于电话的调查。此外，我们将使用某些具有地区参考意义的街道名称的频率，以及每个市政当局的“旧县车牌照”(Altkreis-Autokennzeichen)数量，作为揭示地区身份的衡量标准。例如，作为历史政治不稳定和分裂的衡量标准，我们将计算德国某个地区或网格单元内不同历史州的数量。我们从今天德国地区历史领土的数字化地图中获得这些数据。使用这些数据，我们想要评估历史上的政治不稳定和分裂是否决定了当前的历史地区身份，以及作为下一步，这些地区身份如何影响总体经济结果，如创新或贸易，以及金融、行为和政治偏好。为了确定历史政治稳定对地区认同的因果影响，我们想要利用关于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，主要是由于外生/特殊原因，如统治者去世，没有男性继承人。

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.