Markus Tepe

Are Aging OECD Welfare States on the Path to Gerontocracy

Since  the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding  years. We use panel data from – to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in  OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.

Elderly bias, new social risks and social spending: change and timing in eight programmes across four worlds of welfare, 1980-2003

Over the past decades, all affluent welfare states have been coping with two major new trends: population ageing and new social risks resulting from de-industrialization. How have these demand-side trends, and their timing, affected welfare spending? We investigate up to 21 OECD democracies with respect to eight separate programmes and two composite indicators of aggregate welfare spending bias towards the elderly and new social risks. We find that welfare regime logics still matter crucially in accounting for variation between countries, as does the timing of the large-scale arrival of new social risks. Both Southern European welfare states and countries that entered the post-industrial society comparatively late spend less on programmes such as education and family allowances, and more on survivor pensions. However within countries, contemporaneous levels of new social risks conspicuously fail to affect spending on programmes that deal with these risks. These findings defy simple neo-pluralist expectations of social policy responsiveness: on their own, even dramatic demand-side trends influence welfare spending relatively little in advanced democracies.

Age-Based Self-Interest, Intergenerational Solidarity and the Welfare State: A Comparative Analysis of Older People’s Attitudes Towards Public Childcare in 12 OECD Countries

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 intergenerational solidarity, suggesting that only age-based self-interest motivates welfare preferences. Against this backdrop, this article asks: Does the experience of intergenerational solidarity within the family matter for older people’s attitudes towards public childcare, a policy area of no personal interest to them? The statistical analysis of a sample with individuals aged 55 from 12 OECD countries indicates that (1) intergenerational solidarity matters, that (2) its effect on policy preferences is context-dependent and that (3) influential contexts must – according to the evidence from 12 countries - be sought in all societal spheres, the political (family spending by the state), the economic (female labour market integration) and the cultural (public opinion towards working mothers). Overall, the findings imply that policy-makers need to deal with a way more complex picture of preference formation toward the welfare state than popular stereotypes of “greedy geezers�? suggest.

Doing it for the Kids? The Determinants of Attitudes towards Public Childcare in Unified Germany

In order to explain why people differ in their attitudes towards public childcare, we present a theoretical framework that integrates four causal mechanisms: regime socialization, political ideology, family involvement and material self-interest. Estimation results obtained from multivariate regressions on the 2002 German General Social Survey and replications on the 2008/9 European Social Survey can be condensed into three statements: (1) Regime socialization is the single most important determinant of attitudes toward public childcare followed by young age as an indicator of self-interest and political ideology. Family involvement does not have any sizeable impact. (2) Regime socialization conditions the impact of some indicators of political ideology and family involvement on attitudes toward public childcare. (3) Despite a paradigmatic shift in policy, the dynamics of 2008 mirror those of 2002, highlighting the stability of inter-individual differences in support. The results suggest that the “shadow of communism” still stretches over what people in the East expect from the welfare state and that individual difference in the demand for public childcare appears to be highly path-dependent.

Parties, Unions, and Activation Strategies: The Context-Dependent Politics of Active Labor Market Policy Spending

This article explores the diverging roles of left-wing parties and trade unions in determining active labour market programme (ALMP) spending. We argue that unions today increasingly take into account the distinct re-employability worries of their members. Rather than as a labour market outsider programme, unions now consider ALMPs, especially those sub-programmes most directly useful to their members, as their second-best or first-best feasible priority. Specifically, in countries where high job protection levels (the first-best goal) have not been achieved, more powerful unions will promote ALMP spending as an alternative way to offer their members some measure of labour market security. We test these arguments on a sample of twenty OECD countries between 1986 and 2005. Using a new measure of leftness, we find that left-wing party power has no effect on ALMP spending generally and a negative effect on job creation spending. By contrast, larger and more strike-prone unions are associated with higher ALMP spending overall, and specifically on those programmes most benefiting their members: employment assistance and labour market training. Moreover, union strategies are context dependent. More powerful unions push for more activation spending, especially in labour markets where jobs are not yet well protected.

Who Cuts Back and When? The Politics of Delays in Social Expenditure Cutbacks, 1980-2005

This article investigates the politics of delays in social spending cutbacks in OECD democracies. In the context of fiscal austerity, policymakers are assumed to have a strong incentive to manipulate the timing of cutbacks strategically. Applying event history analysis to small and large cutbacks in 21 mature welfare states, the authors test whether partisanship, electioneering and institutional constraints contribute to explain the timing of cutbacks. Macro-economic determinants such as worker productivity, economic growth and unemployment are found to be more important than these political variables. However, left-wing governments and welfare states with more institutional rigidity or a greater degree of contribution financing do tend to delay welfare cutbacks, while cabinets that have recently changed their party composition implement cutbacks earlier.

Cops for Hire? The Political Economy of Police Employment in the German States

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 employment generally, and police employment specifically, are promising domains for such tactics. Timing the hiring of police officers during election periods may increase votes, as these are ‘street-visible’ jobs dealing with politically salient issues. Law-and-order competence signaling makes police hiring especially attractive for conservative parties. Testing these electioneering and partisanship hypotheses in the German states between 1992 and 2010, we find that socio-economic variables such as population density strongly determine police employment. But incumbents also hire more police officers before elections, while conservative party power increases police numbers. Subjectively ‘immediate’ forms of crime (issue salience) and perceived causes of crime such as immigration are also positively associated with police numbers.

In Public Servants We Trust?: A behavioural experiment on public service motivation and trust among students of public administration, business sciences and law

Abstract Using a laboratory experiment with monetary rewards to explore the effect of self-reported public service motivation (PSM) on choosing to study public administration and on trust behaviour reveals that students of public administration behave more trusting and trustworthy than business sciences and law students. Self-reported PSM is positively associated with trust behaviour, but does not explain trust differences between the three groups. This indicates that the normative orientation that underlies self-reported PSM exerts a stronger influence on behaviour in a low-cost decision than in a high-cost decision with long-term consequences such as choosing a field of study.

Vom Können und Wollen der privaten Altersvorsorge

Zusammenfassung Auf Basis der Daten des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels 2007 untersucht dieser Beitrag, welche individuellen Faktoren die Entscheidung, einen Riester-Vertrag abzuschließen, beeinflussen. Dabei unterscheiden wir zwischen dem faktischen Können, d.h. dem finanziellen Vermögen, und dem tatsächlichen Wollen der Inanspruchnahme einer Riester-Rente. Die Ergebnisse der interaktiven logistischen Regression zeigen, dass im Rahmen der komplexen Entscheidungssituation neben den aus anderen Untersuchungen bekannten Faktoren „Alter“ und „Einkommen“ gerade auch subjektive Risikobewertungen (Perzeption der Gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung/Risiko der Arbeitslosigkeit) relevant werden. Sozialpolitische Reformmaßnahmen, deren Ziel die Erhöhung der Inanspruchnahme einer Riester-Rente ist, sollten demnach gleichermaßen die Vorsorgefähigkeit und die Vorsorgebereitschaft in den Blick nehmen.

The Competing State: Transformations of the Public/Private Sector Earnings Gap in Four Countries

In the ‘Golden Age’ of the modern state, working for the state was a special kind of employment that came with exceptional rights, obligations and remuneration schemes. Employment conditions of public employees, associated with the Weberian bureaucratic ideal, entailed guaranteed lifetime employment, defined pay scales based on formal education and seniority, and standardized, often fairly predictable, career trajectories.