Forced migration, staying minorities, and new societies: evidence from postwar Czechoslovakia

0585199 - NHÚ 2025 RIV US eng J - Journal Article
Grossmann, Jakub - Jurajda, Štěpán - Roesel, F.
Forced migration, staying minorities, and new societies: evidence from postwar Czechoslovakia.
American Journal of Political Science. Roč. 68, č. 2 (2024), s. 751-766. ISSN 0092-5853. E-ISSN 1540-5907
Institutional support: RVO:67985998
Keywords : migration * minorities * postwar Czechoslovakia
OECD category: Applied Economics, Econometrics
Impact factor: 4.2, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Open access
https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12751

Can staying minorities who evade ethnic cleansing affect political outcomes in resettled communities? After World War Two, three million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, but some were allowed to stay, many of them left-leaning antifascists. We study quasi-experimental local variation in expulsion policies, a result of the surprising presence of the U.S. Army, which indirectly helped antifascist Germans stay. We find a long-lasting footprint: Communist party support, party cells, and far-left values are stronger today where antifascist Germans stayed in larger numbers. Postwar German Communist elites appear to be behind this effect along with the intergenerational transmission of values among active party members.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0352942