Do Autocrats Respond to Citizen Demands? Petitions and Housing Construction in the GDR

Citizens in authoritarian regimes frequently communicate grievances to the government. While there is some evidence that governments respond to such petitions, little is known about the nature of this responsiveness: can petitions influence resource allocation and yield tangible improvements to citizens’ livelihoods? To answer this question, we assemble a novel panel of housing-related petitions to the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all housing constructed between 1945 and 1989. Exploiting the timing of the largest housing program in 1971, we employ a difference-in-differences approach to show that construction was targeted at regions with higher rates of petitioning. We then use a variance decomposition method to benchmark petitions against objective indicators of housing need. Our results suggest that petitions allow citizens to meaningfully influence the allocation of public resources. The paper contributes to nascent scholarship on responsiveness in non-democratic regimes by linking responsiveness to tangible improvements in citizens’ livelihoods.