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...