Dr. Maj-Britt Sterba

Fairness · Inequality · Political Behaviour

I am a behavioural economist with an interdisciplinary approach to understanding individuals' attitudes and decision-making. I use experimental and observational methods to address foundational questions about political behaviour, with a focus on economic inequality and political representation. 

Currently affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher with the Cluster "The Politics of Inequality" at the University of Konstanz. 

One focus of my research is to understand when people find inequality fair or unfair, as well as the reasons and consequences of these judgments. In one study, co-authored with Sören Harrs, we combine experimental games with large-scale surveys to study how perceptions of the fairness of economic inequality shape people’s support for redistributive policies. Two main findings are that fairness concerns predict people's support of tax and transfer policies, and that it does so across income groups and political camps. The paper recently won the In_equality ECR Excellence Award and is available here. I am also interested in a deeper understanding of people's beliefs in meritocracy, for example, how these beliefs can be challenged by experiences of crises and how they intertwine with discriminatory attitudes. 

A second focus of my research lies in the study of the attitudes and decision-making of elected politicians. As these are the people ultimately responsible for policy-making, getting a better understanding of the (limiting) factors driving their behavior — and how they compare to the broad citizenry — is very exciting. I am fortunate to be part of a project that uses large-scale studies with legislators from 14 countries to tackle these questions. One topic I am working on is how legislators integrate new information, such as non-salient effects of a policy or its support among citizens and other legislators.

If you speak German, you can listen to Christian Breunig and me discuss studying political elites in this podcast.