Learning from the Past

Can teaching the history of authoritarian regimes built on extreme ideology lastingly reduce support for those ideologies? The paper presented in this Mannheim Applied Seminar leverages a natural experiment in Germany where the senior high school history curriculum exogenously alternated covering, across cohorts, the communist German Democratic Republic and fascist Nazi Germany. Data collected a decade post-graduation reveals that studying the GDR rather than the Nazi regime increases knowledge about the GDR and reduces support for extreme left-wing ideology. The treatment does not increase support for extreme right-wing ideology on average, but does so in more right-leaning regions, highlighting substitutabilities of the production function of extreme ideology.