Do liberal societies cultivate and sustain the social norms and other preferences required to perpetuate their basic institutions in the long run? To explore the dynamic stability of liberalism as a culture-institutions coevolutionary process, we measure the value of personal autonomy and aversion to being controlled by others, among East Germans raised under Communist rule and East Germans raised in liberal Germany. Consistent with a positive response to our motivating question, in behavioral experiments we find that those raised in greater freedom adopted more pro-personal-autonomy preferences, a result unlikely to reflect age effects (based on evidence from West German cohorts).
