Knowledge and Power in State Socialism: Statistical Conventions and Housing Policy in the GDR

Since the late 1970s, the historiography of State socialist regimes in Central Europe has been largely structured by an opposition between a "top-down" political history and a more "bottom-up" social history, leaving the analysis of public policy in a sort of no-man's land between politics and society. Without competitive elections, freedom of expression, or interest-group mobilization or participation, most determinants of policy routinely studied in Western democracies are inoperative. Furthermore, given that State socialist regimes and centralized economic planning appear to be historical dead ends, what can be learned today from the study of this political experiment? In this article on housing policy in the GDR, I will argue that the question of knowledge, its construction, its circulation, and its uses are at least as essential to the intelligibility of these regimes as the study of ideology and repression.

Central State control over all economic and symbolic resources and the systematic exclusion of autonomous social input makes State socialist systems an interesting place to study bureaucratic domination in a "pure" form.¹ More precisely, in a context where decisionmakers were largely insulated from social forces, statistical knowledge, surrounded by its aura of scientific objectivity,² constituted an essential basis for policy formulation and a vector of the bureaucratic domination of society.³ For scholars of State socialism, policy analysis holds the potential to link together "top down" and "bottom-up" approaches by studying the bureaucratic ordering of society and the effects of policies on social identities. More generally, the study of the construction and uses of statistical conventions in State socialism mirrors, in an extreme form, bureaucratic processes of knowledge production and use common to all modern States.

In the GDR, central bureaucracies under the command of the party leadership controlled both housing construction and allocation. The State monopoly of housing was justified by the supposed incapacity of market mechanisms to resolve the "housing question," a problem framed since the nineteenth century as part of the broader "social question." The ability to rebuild war-torn cities and to solve the housing question therefore became an important measure of the success of socialism, especially after 1973, when the resolution of the housing question was proclaimed to be the cornerstone of Erich Honecker's "real existing socialism."

Replacing market regulation through bureaucratic procedures implied the intensive use of statistical indicators in order to create homogeneous categories of observation and action necessary to coordinate a number of complex and interdependent operations: housing construction, the territorial distribution of investments, housing allocation to individuals, groups and institutions, and so on. The central cognitive operation consisted in establishing a relationship between people and housing based on a series of hypotheses of legitimate needs. This harmonization of the social and the material allowed for comparisons and provided a basis for public action that reinforced the legitimacy of the State by providing "objective" and parsimonious criteria for allocating scarce resources. If the Politburo had the final decision on most matters, these decisions were themselves based on causal stories underpinned by statistical conventions that made some problems highly visible and rendered others invisible. Explaining change in policy therefore requires understanding not only the power relations within the Politburo but also understanding the way in which bureaucratic and social processes created the perceptual lenses through which decision-makers, shielded from direct and organized public input, viewed their own society.

Far from being static, policies and statistical conventions changed during the 40-year history of the GDR, changes that were driven by competition between rival expert groups and bureaucracies, but also through difficulties in policy implementation, as will be demonstrated through a case study of the city of Leipzig. By linking together the sociology of actors specialized in housing policy, statistical conventions, and interactions with the public, the article seeks to specify the contribution of statistical knowledge to the exercise of poweróand its limitsóin State socialist regimes.

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