The Empire is Dead, Long Live the Empire! Long-Run Persistence of Trust and Corruption in the Bureaucracy

By Sascha O. Becker, K. Boeckh, Christa Hainz, Ludger Woessmann. Social Science Research Network, 2016

524 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Do empires affect attitudes towards the state long after their demise? We hypothesize that the Habsburg Empire with its localized and well-respected administration increased citizens’ trust in local public services. In several Eastern European countries, communities on both sides of the long-gone Habsburg border have been sharing common formal institutions for a century now. Identifying from individuals living within a restricted band around the former border, we find that historical Habsburg affiliation increases current trust and reduces corruption in courts and police. Falsification tests of spuriously moved borders, geographic and pre-existing differences, and interpersonal trust corroborate a genuine Habsburg effect.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14cd1db214b3f68f4483445b360469c15869d317

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Citations in the corpus

Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change (2017, background): “Advance access publication 27 December 2020 Understanding Cultural Persistence and Change”
The Development Effects of the Extractive Colonial Economy: The Dutch Cultivation System in Java (2019, unknown): “Carvalho, A. Ozdaglar, and A. Tahbaz-Salehi (2012): “The Network Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations,” Econometrica, 80, 1977–2016. Acemoglu, D., C. Garcia-Jimeno, and J. A. Robinson (2015): “State Capacity and Economic Development: A Network Approach,” American Economic Review, 105, 2364–2409. Acemog”
Culture and the Historical Process (2012, background): “Becker et al. (2011) examine Eastern European communities within the same contemporary country, but on either side of the historical Habsburg border. They show that communities that were formerly part of the Habsburg Empire, with its greatly respected and well-functioning bureaucracy, today have gre”
Natural Experiments in Macroeconomics (2015, unknown): “However, similar to Becker et al. (2011), he finds no effect on measures of civic behavior and trust toward strangers.”
My parents taught Me. Evidence on the family transmission of values (2015, unknown): “(2013), and Becker et al. (2015), local culture and institutions can influence individual cultural traits.”
States and economic growth: Capacity and constraints☆ (2017, background): “Becker et al. (2016) study the modern legacy of the bureaucratic reforms implemented in the Habsburg empire by Joseph II.”
Can Policy Change Culture? Government Pension Plans and Traditional Kinship Practices (2021, background): “Other papers study the effect of different historical empires (Peisakhin, 2010; Becker et al., 2015; Grosfeld and Zhuravskaya, 2015; Wysokinskya, 2015).”