Learning from the Past: How History Education Shapes Support for Extreme Ideology (together with Luca Braghieri)

Can teaching the history of authoritarian regimes built on extreme ideology lastingly reduce support for those ideologies? We leverage a natural experiment in Germany where the senior high school history curriculum exogenously alternated covering, across cohorts, the communist German Democratic Republic and fascist Nazi Germany. Data collected a decade post-graduation reveals that studying the GDR rather than the Nazi regime increases knowledge about the GDR and reduces support for extreme left-wing ideology. The treatment does not increase support for extreme right-wing ideology on average, but does so in more right-leaning regions, highlighting substitutabilities of the production function of extreme ideology.