When are high earnings considered a legitimate target for redistribution, and when not? We design a real-effort laboratory experiment in which we manipulate the assignment of payrates (societal ‘reward rules') that translate performance on a real-effort counting task into pre-tax earnings. We...

In times of an alleged waning of political business cycles and partisan policymaking, vote-seeking policymakers can be expected to shift the use of political manipulation mechanisms towards other policy domains in which the macro-institutional environment allows them greater leverage. Public...

This study explores the determinants of public employees’ job satisfaction. We are focusing on three concepts – reciprocal motives, personality traits and wage differences – to explain job satisfaction and production sector affiliation. Estimation results obtained from multivariate...

This article examines the relationship between public administration regulation and market economy models in 20 OECD countries. Building on Pollitt and Bouckaert’s (2004) administrative dimension, we employ explorative statistical analysis to identify three distinct public administration...

When faced with the necessity of reforming welfare states in ageing societies, politicians tend to demand more solidarity between generations because they assume that reforms require sacrifices from older people. Political economy models, however, do not investigate such a mechanism of...

This study analyzes whether enabling people to get informed about redistributive consequences is an effective measure to prevent equivalence framing in the domain of voting on redistribution. Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer-Richard model, an equivalent frame is induced by letting...

This article explores the diverging roles of leftwing parties and trade unions in determining active labor market program (ALMP) spending. We argue that unions today increasingly take into account the distinct re-employability worries of their members. Rather than as a labor market outsider...

This article explores the associations between self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behavior. We study three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We use laboratory experiments with monetary...

This paper investigates the politics of delays in pension generosity cutbacks in 18 OECD democracies between 1981 and 1999 by using event history analysis. In the context of fiscal austerity, policymakers are assumed to have a strong incentive to manipulate the timing of cutbacks strategically....