Do Less Stable Borders Lead to Lower Levels of Political Trust? Empirical Evidence from Eastern Europe

Abstract

This paper examines the effect of historical changes in political borders on culture, specifically levels of trust in political institutions. The identification strategy is to focus on regions that are part of the same country today and, therefore, share the same political institutions, but have had different numbers of border changes in the past. This within-country variation is satisfied for six Eastern European countries – Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania and Ukraine. Using three independent data sources, this paper shows that indeed more stable political borders do lead to higher levels of political trust. The effect is stronger for older people and individuals who did not move, as predicted by this paper’s framework. Furthermore, frequent border changes could explain 45% of difference in political trust between the UK, which enjoyed stable borders, and the countries studied in this paper. This effect persists even after controlling for a rich set of covariates, undertaking extensive robustness tests and use of geographic instrumental variables.