The Dual Logic of Historical Events' Impact on the Distribution of Political Engagement: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the German Reunification Period

Sergio Galaz-Garcia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)

How are the effects that historical events have on political engagement socially distributed? As an alternative to theories that see the individual-level political impacts of moments of political contingency as top-down processes of historical imprinting, I introduce a set of distributional hypotheses that see these influences as actively mediated by bottom-up processes of historical sensing. I argue that due to socioeconomic and life-cycle differences in political interest, historical events produce increases in politicization whose strength and socially equalizing effects follow and young adulthood gradient. Politicization increases are highest for young people. These increases are organized in a way that shrinks socioeconomic disparities in their political engagement. Other ages, on the other hand, experience more moderate politicization increases that make socioeconomic disparities in political engagement grow. I test these hypotheses by analyzing patterns of political talk in West Germany relative to France before and during the German Reunification Period (Nov ’89- Dec –‘90). Using an original indicator that measures yearly levels of eventfulness, I identified this context as a quasi-experimental research setting. The results of my analysis strongly support my argument of perception-based distributional effects of historical events. They indicate that moments of historical contingency carry distinctive and intersectional logics of influence across age and socioeconomic status. They also call for further research on how people make sense and differentially react to the historical contexts they experience.

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 Presented in Session 5. Reimagining Research Traditions: New Approaches to Method and Measurement