Politico-Economic Regimes and Attitudes: Female Workers Under State-Socialism

This paper investigates the extent to which attitudes are affected by political regimes and government policies, and the channels of influence. We focus on gender-role attitudes and female attitudes toward work, exploiting the imposition of state-socialist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe, and the fact that the new regimes encouraged women’s employment, for both ideological and instrumental reasons. We use two different identiï¬ cation strategies and datasets. First, we take advantage of the German partition into East and West after 1945 and restricted-access information on place of residence to execute a spatial regression discontinuity design. We ï¬ nd more positive attitudes toward work in the sample of women who used to live in East Germany. In terms of channels, we ï¬ nd evidence that the experience of employment, arguably one of the very few positive aspects of living under state-socialism in East Germany, changed women’s attitudes. We do not ï¬ nd similar evidence for the role of propaganda. Second, we employ a difference-in-differences strategy that compares attitudes formed in Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) and Western European Countries (WECs), before and after the imposition of state socialism in CEECs. Gender-role attitudes formed in CEECs during the state socialist period appear to be signiï¬ cantly less traditional than those formed in WECs. Overall, our study addresses previous identiï¬ cation and data limitations and ï¬ nds that attitudes are profoundly affected by politico-economic regimes.