Simon Weschle

Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing : the rival pressures from age and income in 14 OECD countries

This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state preferences. In particular for the case of education spending, but also for other policy areas, we see that ones position in the life cycle is a more important predictor of preferences than income. Second, some countries, such as the United States, show a higher salience of the age cleavage across all policy fields; that is, age is a more important line of political preference formation in these countries than in others. Third, country characteristics matter. Although the relative salience of age varies across policy areas, we see — within one policy area — a large variance across countries.

The Impact of Economic Crises on Political Representation in Public Communication: Evidence from the Eurozone

External threats such as war have been shown to disrupt representation as politicians ‘put politics aside’ and cooperate across cleavages. This article examines whether a severe economic crisis can have a similar effect. It introduces a new approach that provides a spatial representation of how political parties represent societal actors in their public interactions, based on more than 140,000 machine coded news events from eleven eurozone countries between 2001 and 2011. The study shows that in bad economic times, there is a compression of political representation: parties’ relationships with the societal groups they are closest to become less cooperative, while their relationships with the groups they are least close to become less conflictual.

Punishing personal and electoral corruption: Experimental evidence from India

A growing literature examines the effect of corruption on political behavior. However, little attention has been paid so far to the fact that politicians engage in it for various reasons and with different welfare consequences. In this article, I argue that voters judge corrupt politicians differently depending on what the money is used for. I show results from a survey experiment in India in which respondents heard about a politician who accepted money for a political favor. One treatment group was told that the politician used the money to personally enrich himself (personal corruption), while the other group was informed that he used it to buy votes (electoral corruption). Respondents who received the vote buying treatment were clearly and consistently less likely to agree with a series of potential punishments. This suggests that the overall welfare consequences of corrupt exchanges are an important factor when voters decide how to judge offending politicians.