Publikationsliste KOPS

Though the literature on perceptions of inequality and studies of ‘elites’ have identified the importance of meritocratic beliefs in legitimating inequality, little is known about the role of pay setting processes in sustaining ideals of meritocracy. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with UK-based top income earners working mainly in finance, I analyse how top income earners perceive economic inequality. My study highlights the crucial role of performance pay for perceptions that top incomes are meritocratically deserved. Participants expressed the view that performance pay, an increasingly prevalent pay-setting practice, ensures that top incomes reflect a share of economic ‘value created’ for shareholders, clients or investors. Focusing on narrow, economic criteria of evaluation perceived as objective, the majority of respondents (‘performance pay meritocrats’) justified any income difference as deserved if it reflects economic contribution. Meanwhile, a minority of respondents (‘social reflexivists’) applied broader evaluative criteria including distributive justice and social contributions.

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International aid donors now allocate the majority of development assistance to conflict-affected countries. Aid scholarship largely classifies this subset of recipients as poorly governed countries where donors bypass the government in favor or third-party implementers. We argue that further disaggregation shows how donors use different aid types—humanitarian, transitional, development, and budgetary aid—to support postconflict transitions. We expect that when a postconflict country signals progression toward peace, donors will give development and budgetary aid to the government and withdraw humanitarian and transitional aid; when the country signals regression toward violence, donors will do the inverse. To test our expectations, we use an original survey-embedded experiment completed by 1,130 aid experts around the globe. Our findings generally support our expectations, although they reveal important nuances. In particular, they show that experts are more certain of how donors aid countries that are progressing toward peace than those that are returning to war.

The nascent literature on the political consequences of technological change studies either left-behind voters or successful technology entrepreneurs ("superstars"). However, it neglects the large share of skilled workers who bene t from limited but steady economic improvements in the knowledge economy. This paper examines how workplace digitalization a ects political preferences among the entire active labor force by combining individual-level panel data from the United Kingdom with industry-level data on ICT capital stocks between 1997-2017. We rst demonstrate that digitalization was economically bene cial for workers with middle and high levels of education. We then show that growth in digitalization increased support for the Conservative Party, the incumbent party, and voter turnout among bene ciaries of economic change. Our results hold in an instrumental variable analysis and multiple robustness checks. While digitalization undoubtedly produces losers (along with some superstars), ordinary winners of digitalization are an important stabilizing force content with the political status quo.

What kind of welfare state do voters of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) want and how do their preferences differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties? In this paper, we draw on an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related social policies in eight Western European countries to measure (1) support for social transfers, (2) support for workfare and (3) support for social investment. Challenging the view that PRRPs turned into pro-welfare parties, our results indicate that their voters want a particularistic-authoritarian welfare state, displaying moderate support only for ‘deserving’ benefit recipients (e.g. the elderly), while revealing strong support for a workfare approach and little support for social investment. These findings have important implications for contemporary debates about the future of capitalism and the welfare state.