The science of politics
Jens Hainmueller looks for experiments to answer tough political questions.
Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office
A common piece of received wisdom about the Cold War is that the spread of Western culture helped bring down the Berlin Wall: Exposure to Western television shows, the idea goes, demonstrated to East Germans, among others, what they were missing by not living in a free society, and loosened the hold of that country’s Communist government on its people.
It is an appealing hypothesis. But is it true? Several years ago, political scientist Jens Hainmueller figured out a way to test it: Due to an accident of topography, residents of Dresden, in East Germany, did not receive Western television (the city lies in a basin), while people who lived nearby did. Using a variety of data — surveys of attitudes and political views, exit-visa applications, and more — Hainmueller and his colleague Holger Lutz Kern of the University of South Carolina found that, other things being equal, East Germans with access to West German television were actually more supportive of the Communist regime than those who did not watch Western programming.
“Having Western television just made people more content with living there,” explains Hainmueller, now an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.
“It provided entertainment, movies, soccer games. A lot had been written on the effects of political propaganda, but the design of this study gave us the opportunity to isolate cause and effect” ...
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/faculty-profile-hainmueller-political-science-0306.html
