Politics and parents — Intergenerational transmission of values after a regime shift

Exploiting the “natural experiment” of German reunification, we study whether socialism has an enduring effect on people's basic values. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that individuals that lived in the German Democratic Republic assign different importance to six out of nine values. The first subsequent generation differs in a similar way from their West German control group. The positive association between parents' and children's values does not significantly differ between East and West German families. The finding is consistent with the notion that parents are motivated by the belief that their own values are the best for the child to have. The effect of intergenerational transmission on the persistence of values is small to moderate. The link tends to be higher if the importance of a domain is more disputed in the population.