Echoes of the past: The enduring impact of communism on contemporary freedom of speech values

• This paper provides evidence that political regimes causally impact free speech values. • We show that living under communism has had lasting effects on free speech values. • East Germans are less likely assess free speech as a government priority than West Germans. • The effects are the largest for cohorts that lived the longest under communism. • Ideological indoctrination and collective encounters with repression are the likely channels behind our results. Free speech is essential for informed decision-making, government efficacy, and fostering innovation in liberal societies. But what promotes or hinders freedom of speech values? Exploiting the natural experiment of German separation and later reunification, we show that living under communism has had lasting effects on free speech opinions, and the convergence process has been slow. East Germans are still less likely to consider freedom of speech a key government priority than West Germans. The effects are the largest for cohorts that lived the longest under communism. This provides evidence that more prolonged exposure to the features of socialism—including indoctrination and repression—collectively lowers the appreciation of freedom of speech values. Our results are robust to a battery of sensitivity checks and provide suggestive evidence pointing to indoctrination as a mechanism behind our findings. As such, our paper contributes to the scarce body of literature on the economics of free speech, suggesting that freedom of speech may be a part of informal institutions and slow-changing cultural values.