Strong institutional constraints and better-informed voters may lead re-election seeking incumbents to shift the use of political business cycle mechanisms away from monetary and fiscal policy towards other policy domains that are more easily manipulable, targetable, and timeable. We investigate...

The role of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits in driving welfare state attitudes has received scant attention in social policy research. Yet neuroticism in particular – a disposition to stress, worry and get nervous easily – is theoretically likely to be an important driver of welfare...

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...