This paper is about the relative impact of retirement and social class on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies. Which factor is more important in explaining individuals' social policy preferences: socio-economic background or retirement? How can...

This paper is about the relative impact of retirement and social class on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies. Which factor is more important in explaining individuals' social policy preferences: socio-economic background or retirement? How can...

The positive association between education and voting participation is well-documented in the literature. What has not been studied so far is the variation of the micro-level effect of education across countries and whether the institutional set-up of the political economy might contribute to...

This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analyzing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Employing an experimental vignette study, we uncover complex feedback effects: First, citizens in the study regard a fee level as fair that is close to...

Is there an antagonism between young and old in the electoral arena that could lead to the obstruction of welfare-state reforms? This article argues that this notion is a myth and lacks empirical evidence for the case of Germany. It is true that (a) there are imminent majorities of voters aged...

The literature notes an increasing trend towards labor market stratification and dualization in coordinated market economies such as Germany. Labor market insiders and insider-oriented cross-class coalitions are usually identified as the driving forces behind these developments. This paper adds...

Das deutsche Berufsbildungssystem ist im Wandel. Doch dieser Wandlungsprozess entfaltet sich nicht in großen Reformprojekten, sondern in Form von kleinen Schritten, die – über einen langen Zeitraum betrachtet – das System als Ganzes deutlich verändert haben. Das Buch zeichnet diesen...

This paper builds on the arguments developed by Carles Boix (1997, 1998) about partisan differences in supply-side oriented strategies. The original Boix model argues that social democrats in government prefer to increase public investment in human capital formation, while conservatives are...

Scholars have argued about the impact of fiscal decentralisation on public spending for a long time without coming to any firm theoretical and empirical conclusions. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper looks at the impact of fiscal decentralisation across different types of spending. It...

The COVID-19 pandemic poses a tremendous challenge to health care systems around the globe. Using original panel survey data for the case of Germany, this paper studies how specific trust in the health care system's ability to cope with this crisis has evolved over the course of the pandemic. It...