Introduction and Contribution:

Authoritarian regimes are often reluctant to let their citizens leave: 79% of autocracies restrict emigration compared to only 4% of democracies. This reluctance is understandable, as migration deprives rulers of talent, resources, and implied consent to the system. Yet autocracies do change their emigration laws. What are the consequences of these changes? 

In “A Little Lift in the Iron Curtain,” Hans Lueders examines how a 1983 emigration reform in socialist East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) affected crime rates in the country. The reform permitted about 62,500 citizens to exit the GDR over a short period of time — mostly to reunite with their families in West Germany. Lueders asks how this emigration affected crime. This is a natural outcome to consider because the former GDR, like many autocracies, used the emigration system to filter out individuals seen as criminals or  “undesirables.” Unauthorized exit was criminalized, and some citizens committed crimes precisely to signal that they should be allowed to leave.
 

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Figure 1: Consequences of the 1983 Emigration Reform
Note. This figure reports the number of first-time exit visa applications per year (gray line [Eisenfeld 1995, 202]) and annual emigration from the former GDR (black line; data collected by the author). The period after the emigration reform is emphasized.
 

Lueders shows that the effects of emigration following the 1983 reform on criminal activity depended on the type of crime. Ordinary kinds of crime — those not committed for political motifs — declined after the reform. However, border-related crimes increased sharply. This is ostensibly because those “left behind” (i.e., unable to take advantage of the 1983 reforms) resumed lawbreaking in order to pressure the regime to let them out as well. An analysis of petitions submitted to the state supports the idea that emigration raised demand for emigration.

The paper makes important contributions to our knowledge of authoritarianism and migration. For one, it shows how policies enacted to temporarily satisfy domestic or international audiences can backfire, later increasing the state’s burden. Autocrats may behave strategically in the short run, yet their choices can have powerful, unanticipated consequences in the years ahead. Otherwise, “strong” and repressive autocracies like the former GDR may struggle to address migratory pressures and be too inflexible to switch course after negative consequences become apparent. 

Safety Valves and Reform in East Germany:

Social scientists have argued that emigration policy under authoritarianism can serve as a “safety valve,” allowing or forcing the exit of those who threaten the stability of the regime. In addition, requiring citizens to apply for exit visas acts as a “screening mechanism” because applying is politically costly; those who keep applying reveal themselves to be potential troublemakers whose exit ought to be permitted. Lueders provides evidence that the costs of applying for exit visas were indeed high in the former GDR: applicants (and sometimes their families) were intimidated and harassed by secret police, expelled from universities, and demoted or fired. The state also tried to “win over” prospective emigrants, showing them reports about the allegedly dismal living conditions in West Germany or letters from East German refugees begging authorities to return to the GDR.

Importantly, officials considered how emigration would influence the GDR’s stability, looking for those who opposed the country and its socialist vision. Many applicants realized this and thus sought to publicly challenge the regime, for example, by leaving socialist mass organizations or abstaining from voting. Committing crimes thus raised one’s chances of successfully emigrating. East Germans watched peers and family members break the law to force their exit, learning that the system encouraged and rewarded criminality. 

After Germany’s division into two, many East Germans preferred the economic and political freedoms found in democratic West Germany. The government thus grew concerned: most émigrés were young and educated, and their exit undermined the GDR’s claims that it was popular and that socialism was the superior politico-economic system. Accordingly, emigration was criminalized in 1952, and the GDR began erecting physical barriers, culminating in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Emigration plummeted to between 25,000 and 40,000 per year thereafter.

Emigration remained severely limited until the early 1980s, when international pressure — from both West Germany and the Soviet Union — to reform its emigration system began to build. Ultimately, in September 1983, the GDR conceded and recognized the right of all citizens with family abroad to apply for an exit visa. 

After the reform, exit visa applications and departures surged, the largest wave since the Berlin Wall’s construction. Emigration patterns evidenced a clear demographic shift: émigrés were less likely to be retired or to have formerly served in prison, while working-age East Germans made up 75% of emigrants, up from 49%. The state viewed this emigration wave as a welcome opportunity to get rid of criminals and political enemies. However, it underestimated the long-term consequences of offering some citizens a way out.
 

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Table 1: Comparison of Emigrants in 1983 and 1984 (January to June of each year)
 

Data and Findings:

To measure the effects of the 1983 policy on crime, Lueders presents crime data from 1976 to 89. He divides crime into “ordinary,” e.g., against state property or persons, and “political” crimes, e.g., the use of force against state officials, treason, and, importantly, illegal border crossings. Two of Lueders’ key hypotheses for our purposes are that emigration reform led to (1) a decline in ordinary crime, because the GDR effectively removed so-called troublemakers (the safety valve mechanism), and (2) a rise in border crimes, because those left behind were willing to break the law in order to exit (the demand mechanism).

The statistical analysis — consisting of comparing places with varying emigration rates — is consistent with both hypotheses. For the most part, ordinary crime declined after 1983. By contrast, border crime also initially declined, but this pattern dramatically reversed within two years. By 1987, border crimes began to rise significantly in places that had experienced a lot of emigration in the initial wave. Lueders thus provides evidence that in the short run, emigration indeed functioned as a safety valve (i.e., criminals were successfully identified). But thereafter, emigration had severe repercussions: rather than alleviating pressure on the regime, it created even greater demand for emigration — and thus more criminal activity.

A final piece of evidence comes from detailed data on petitions. The GDR encouraged citizens to communicate a range of demands and grievances to state officials, including the desire to emigrate. Lueders shows that in 1984, over 16,000 petitions were written specifically about emigration, which constituted nearly 28% of the total number of exit visa applications. And these petitions for exit visas increased substantially more in areas with above-average emigration during the initial emigration wave, suggesting that greater emigration in one period was associated with greater demand for it in subsequent periods. An understanding of East Germany illustrates how autocrats face a delicate balance between permitting migration and managing its consequences.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Motivation

Retaliation (or the threat thereof) is a central component of human behavior. It plays a key role in sustaining cooperation — such as in international organizations or free trade agreements — because those known to retaliate come to acquire a reputation of being hard to exploit. But how does the use and function of retaliation vary across cultures, and how does it interact with formal forms of punishment?

In “Cross-cultural differences in retaliation: Evidence from the soccer field,” Alain Schläpfer tackles these questions using data on retaliation from association football. Retaliation is simply defined in terms of fouling: player B retaliates against player A if and only if, after A fouls B, B then fouls A. Among other findings, Schläpfer shows that players from cultures emphasizing revenge are more likely to retaliate on the football field. This form of ‘informal punishment’ by players also interacts with ‘formal punishment’ by referees: retaliation by B is less likely when A is sanctioned with a yellow card. Schläpfer’s paper increases our knowledge of the causes and consequences of retaliation, while showing how informal cultural norms interact with the formal rules of football.  

Data

Schläpfer creates a data set of fouls committed over three football seasons (2016-2019) in nine of the world’s top professional men’s leagues. This includes the European leagues of Premier League (England), Serie A (Italy), Bundesliga (Germany), LaLiga (Spain), and Ligue 1 (France), as well as Série A (Brazil), Liga Profesional (Argentina), Liga MX (Mexico), and Major League Soccer (United States). The dataset comprises 9,531 games, 230,113 fouls committed by 10,928 unique perpetrators from 139 countries against 11,115 unique victims from 137 countries.

Because Schläpfer hypothesizes that being from more revenge-centric cultures explains on-field retaliation, the key independent variable is measured using a dataset from Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Meng Xue that identifies revenge motifs in a culture’s folklore. Examples of this include supernatural forces avenging human murders or animals avenging the death of their friends by humans. Schläpfer uses a host of other independent variables, such as country-level survey data about the desire to punish — as opposed to rehabilitate — criminals, which is also theoretically linked to revenge. As stated above, retaliation is measured in terms of fouls committed. Schläpfer shows that there is substantial variation in retaliation rates among players from different countries, from Gabon (8%) to Iceland (31%). Can the folklore in the country of origin explain the behavior of players on the field?
 

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Fig. 1. The share of fouls retaliated in soccer games (top) and the prevalence of revenge motifs in folklore (bottom). Both variables tend to have higher values for players and folklore from the Middle East, Central Africa, Eastern Europe, and parts of South America.
 

Findings

Retaliation:

Schläpfer finds evidence that players from cultures that value revenge are indeed more likely to retaliate for fouls. However, they are not more likely to commit fouls overall, cautioning us against conflating the concepts of retaliation and violence. Indeed, Schläpfer demonstrates that motifs of violence in a culture's folklore do not predict retaliation. Players are also found to be more retaliatory early on in a game, which is consistent with its use as a signal or aspect of one’s reputation. In other words, retaliation serves to deter future fouls. Victims of fouls also retaliate quickly. Indeed, retaliation rates are stable or slightly increasing during the first 30 minutes of a game, but then fall consistently thereafter.
 

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Evidence is also provided to show that retaliation deters future transgressions: perpetrators are less likely to foul again if victims retaliate for the initial foul. However, this deterrence finding is only observed when the perpetrator is from a revenge culture. In other words, for retaliation to support cooperation (the absence of fouls), players must share a similar cultural background.

Schläpfer’s findings hold even when soccer-related or socioeconomic factors are taken into account. Further, the paper considers, but finds little support for, alternative explanations of why retaliation varies. These include that some teams encourage players to retaliate more or employ more players from revenge cultures. Further, retaliation does not appear to be driven by emotions; otherwise, it would be less likely to occur after halftime when players have had a chance to cool down, but this is not the case.
 

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Informal and Formal Sanctioning:

Finally, Schläpfer analyzes the interaction between player retaliation and refereeing. Most importantly, retaliation is significantly less likely if a foul is sanctioned with a yellow card. This illustrates the theoretical principle of formal punishment “crowding out” informal punishment, such as religious excommunication, which carries greater weight than social shunning or police fines compared to peer pressure. Both retaliation and referee sanctioning are shown to reduce the frequency of repeated offenses by perpetrators, especially among players from revenge cultures. However, Schläpfer finds that formal sanctioning is roughly three times more effective than retaliation. This suggests that football referees are doing a better job managing conflict between players than players themselves. 

Schläpfer concludes by mentioning a few of the paper’s limitations. First of all, retaliation is measured only by what referees sanction. However, referees may miss crucial incidents for which retaliation is a response, such as Zinedine Zidane’s 2006 World Cup headbutt after a verbal insult (that was not sanctioned). This is important because individuals from revenge cultures are likely to be particularly offended by verbal insults. Second, the paper does not capture retaliation that occurs across games played by the same teams over time, particularly when rivalries and hostilities have intensified. Similarly, it does not account for preemptive retaliation that does not follow a foul. Ultimately, Schläpfer deepens our understanding of retaliation in a domain where many would expect it not to operate or to do so with minimal significance. The article impressively marshals large-scale data from both sports and cultural history to clarify the causes and consequences of retaliation.

*Research-in-Brief prepared by Adam Fefer.

Much of the agenda focused on specific proposals answering ten basic questions, including:

• Which sources should AI chatbots draw information from?
• Should AI chatbots use the user’s past conversations to improve user experience?
• Should AI chatbots use the user’s online activity to personalize interactions?
• Should AI chatbots be designed to be human-like?
• Should users be allowed to use AI chatbots for romantic relationships?

The deliberators in each country were convened on the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, developed by the Stanford Crowdsourced Democracy Team. This platform is AI-assisted and moderates video-based discussions in small groups of ten. 

Participants noted a generally positive impact of AI, with an increase in positive perceptions post-forum. "This shift in viewpoint, especially notable among those previously unfamiliar with AI, underscores the value of informed discussion in shaping public opinion," remarked Alice Siu, Senior Research Scholar at FSI and Associate Director of the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab.

The forum's methodical approach, with deliberations in 166 small groups and a separate control group for each country, ensured that the outcomes accurately reflected the effects of the deliberative process. Findings indicated that users and non-users of AI began to bridge their differences, aligning closer in their attitudes towards AI after the forum.

Siu also emphasized the significance of the event’s feedback, noting that "the high ratings from participants affirm the forum’s success in making complex discussions accessible and relevant. It is an encouraging sign for the future of democratic engagement with technology."

The Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab is dedicated to deepening our understanding of deliberative democracy processes and their application to critical contemporary issues like AI. The insights from this forum will inform ongoing research and policy recommendations, ensuring that AI evolves in a manner that considers diverse values and voices across the globe.

The project report is available below:

For detailed information on the forum’s conclusions or forthcoming projects, please reach out to James Fishkin (Director, Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab) or Alice Siu (Associate Director, Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab) or visit the Deliberative Democracy Lab website.

In a statement announcing Olga's honor, Nash Dom wrote:

Today, on December 10, 2022, Olga Karach, Belarusian human rights defender and leader of the International Centre for Civil Initiatives OUR HOUSE, will be awarded the Human Rights Award of the City of Weimar (Germany) at an official ceremony.

Another person to receive the award, will be Irina Shcherbakova, Russian human rights defender and a founder of Memorial, one of the oldest civil rights groups in Russia. Irina Shcherbakova has also been was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with the Belarusian human rights defender, Ales Bialiatski, and Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties.

To remind, this is not the first human rights award received by Olga Karach.

In 2007, the Belarusian group of Amnesty International declared Olga Karach the Human Rights Defender of the Year for her achievements in human rights defending activity.

In 2010, Olga Karach was awarded the Radebeul Courage Prize in Germany.

In 2019, Olga Karach received an International Bremen Peace Award.

In 2021, Olga participated in a Leadership Academy for Development (LAD) course in Prague led by Francis Fukuyama and Erik Jensen, in partnership with the Boris Nemtsov Foundation for Freedom. LAD trains mid-career government officials and business leaders from developing countries to help the private sector be a constructive force for economic growth and development.

Please join us in congratulating Olga on this well-deserved honor. A recording of the Weimar Prize award ceremony can be viewed here (in German).