About this Working Paper

This study compares how politicians and citizens think about redistribution across seven parliaments. It asks where their views align, where they differ, and how fairness beliefs, ideology, and perceptions of inequality shape support for redistributive policies. 

About this Article

In this article, my co-authors and I examine how politicians think about voters and voting behavior. Based on interviews with elected politicians and surveys with citizens across eleven countries, we compare politicians’ assumptions about voters with citizens’ own views of political decision-making.

The article shows that politicians tend to hold more minimalist and less policy-oriented views of voting behavior than citizens themselves.

About this Working Paper

In this paper, Sören Harrs and I study how fairness perceptions shape support for redistribution. We combine experimental games with large-scale surveys to examine when people see economic inequality as fair or unfair — and how these judgments relate to their support for tax and transfer policies. 

Awarded

This paper received the In_equality ECR Excellence Award 2025. 

About this Article

In this article, my co-authors and I examine how citizens and politicians think about redistribution within the public pension system. We study whether people support a strict link between lifetime contributions and pension benefits, or whether they prefer a more redistributive system that gives greater support to lower earners. 

Related Article

In a related article in Wirtschaftsdienst, Friedrich Breyer and I discuss what citizens think about the principle of strict proportionality between pension contributions and pension benefits in the German pension system. 

About this Article

In this article, Friedrich Breyer and I examine how politicians evaluate different ways of financing childcare. We compare support for tax-based funding and user fees, asking which form of policy design elected politicians consider more acceptable. 

Related Media 

In the In_equality magazine, I present this line of research in a more accessible format. The magazine is published by the Cluster of Excellence “The Politics of Inequality” at the University of Konstanz and brings selected research findings to a wider audience.
In the article “Mehr gemeinsam als gedacht?”, my co-authors and I discuss how citizens and elected politicians evaluate the fairness of social policies such as pensions, inheritance tax, tuition fees, and childcare fees.