Markus S. Tepe

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor (Full) at University of Bremen

This study tests whether citizens’ evaluations of the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) in public policies are subject to motivated reasoning. Specifically, we test whether respondents’ preferences for AI regulation or their subjective attitudes toward AI are sources of motivated reasoning across varying use cases, differing in nature, co...

Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on hon...

This chapter discusses the political recognition of needs and the role of expertise in allocation decisions. It reviews three aspects of the political recognition of needs: First, it presents two alternative politico-economic decision frameworks for studying the behavioral consequences of need-based justice. Second, it discusses the scope and diffe...

Building on the concept of participatory regulation, this study emphasizes recognizing the multidimensional character of citizens' risk regulation preferences. Using the case of autonomous vehicles, we specify six technology‐related risks: product safety, regulatory oversight, legal liability, ethical prioritization, data protection, and human supe...

This study examines how public employees and citizens exercise administrative discretion in a dilemma. To identify and compare the moral reasoning underlying discretionary choices, we conducted a conjoint experiment among public employees, future civil servants, and lay citizens in Germany. In the conjoint, respondents were forced to prioritize bet...

Il est essentiel de bien comprendre les questions de délégation administrative pour assurer la performance des organisations publiques. Le jeu du contrôle modélise la délégation comme un conflit d’intérêts entre un inspecteur et une personne contrôlée pour agir dans l’intérêt du premier. La présente étude teste des solutions alternatives pour surmo...

Electoral systems fulfill different functions. Typically, they cannot meet all demands at the same time, so that the evaluation of specific electoral systems depends on subjective preferences about the single demands. We argue that it is the electorate which transfers its power to representatives and, therefore, its preferences should be considered...

Regulating self-driving cars poses a dilemma for policy-makers. Early testing of self-driving cars on public roads is necessary to accumulate data and driving experience. While approval procedures with high safety standards could harm manufacturers' ability to innovate by delaying tests, low safety standards could put human lives at risk. This stud...

Background: Scarcity in supply of COVID-19 vaccines and severe international inequality in their allocation present formidable challenges. These circumstances stress the importance of identifying the conditions under which self-interested vaccine-rich countries will voluntarily donate their surplus vaccines to vaccine-poor countries. Methods: We...

Existing laboratory research suggests that the Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies has limited capacity to predict subjects’ behavior in an Oversight Game (OG). We propose that this inconsistency between the game-theoretical solution and subjects’ actual behavior may be due to the elicitation method used in previous laboratory experiments. To test...

This study presents a theoretical model of honest behavior in the public sector (public sector honesty), and its relationship with corruption. We test this model empirically by utilizing and extending a unique dataset of honest behavior of public and private sector workers across 40 countries, gathered in a field experiment conducted by Cohn et al....

The left–right scale is widely used to measure ideological orientation. Relying on Freeden's approach to political ideology as a ‘conceptual morphology’, we argue that the meaning of ‘left’ and ‘right’ may change, but these changes are more likely for peripheral than core concepts. To test this argument, we analyze open-ended questions on the meani...

Getting a grip on issues of administrative delegation is key to the performance of public organizations. The oversight game models delegation as a conflict of interest between an inspector and an inspectee to act in the interests of the former. This study tests alternative solutions to overcome ‘shirking’ in the oversight game. Specifically, we tes...

Vaccine hesitancy is one of the major obstacles for successfully combating the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve a sufficiently high vaccination rate, calls for compulsory vaccinations have been discussed controversially. This study analyses what drives citizens’ attitudes towards compulsory vaccination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Specificall...

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as ‘the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published’. Of its fifty-one chapters, some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are all right up to date. The first seven sections of the...

The “Handbook of Research Methods in Public Administration, Management and Policy”, edited by Eran Vigoda-Gadot and Dana R. Vashdi and published by Edward Elgar in 2020, offers researchers, students, and practitioners a comprehensive and application-oriented insight into established and newer research designs and analytical methods in empirical adm...

When will self-interested vaccine-rich countries voluntarily donate their surplus vaccines to vaccine-poor countries during a pandemic? We develop a game-theoretic approach to address this question. We identify vaccine-rich countries' optimal surplus donation strategies, and then examine whether these strategies are stable (Nash equilibrium or self...

The design principles of institutions that visibly and significantly affect citizens' lives are likely to be politically salient. Popular support for these principles is in turn crucial for institutional viability and effectiveness. Transboundary pandemics are a case in point. Understanding citizens' preferences regarding the design of internationa...

Income redistribution with an efficiency loss is expected to have a twofold negative effect on support for redistribution, as it lowers egoistic support for redistribution and activates efficiency preferences. This study tests whether such a negative relationship exists, increases with the size of efficiency loss and interacts with group communicat...

Although digital interfaces are increasingly pervading public administration, little is known about how replacing face‐to‐face interaction with digital interfaces affects citizens’ satisfaction with public service encounters. This study presents evidence from a vignette experiment conducted on a sample of German citizens (N=1.234) whereby we random...

What determines citizens’ preferences over alternative decision-making procedures – the personal gain associated with a procedure, or the intrinsic value assigned to it? To answer this question, we present results of a laboratory experiment in which participants select a procedure to decide on the provision of a public good. In the first stage, the...

In Germany, Independent Local Lists (UWG) have become an integral part of local politics in recent decades . Despite their growing political importance, the reasons for their electoral rise have hardly been researched . Recent studies argue that Independent Local Lists pursue anti-party positions, which makes them attractive to voters who are dissa...

Independent local lists (ILL) have become an important non-partisan actor in many local elections. However, little is known about which factors explain their electoral success. Drawing on recent contributions regarding the anti-establishment attitudes of many ILL, we argue that the rise of anti-establishment parties, especially the rise of populist...

When are high earnings considered a legitimate target for redistribution, and when not? We design a real-effort laboratory experiment in which we manipulate the assignment of payrates (societal “reward rules”) that translate performance on a real-effort counting task into pre-tax earnings. We then ask subjects to vote on a flat tax rate in groups o...

Has the COVID-19 pandemic caused early shifts in how citizens view constitutional power balances and policy tradeoffs? We conducted two survey experiments among 1192 Germans during the first week of lockdown. In a priming experiment, subjects were cued to think about the COVID-19 lockdown. While not affecting their ‘federal vs. state’ power balance...

In this chapter, we present the main areas of empirical research and theoretical thought in political science related to need-based distributive justice. From the perspective of positive political research, we discuss how need is conceptualized as a motive for political action in the theory of post-materialism, how different strands of political ec...

Drawing on Weber, this study tests whether the normative principles of merit orientation and impartiality are more prevalent in shaping public hiring preferences among civil servants-both junior and senior-than among private sector employees. In a conjoint experiment, respondents are asked to compare two hypothetical applicants for an office job in...

Electoral systems are a fundamental feature of any democratic system, and the design of an electoral system can have a tremendous impact on party-, candidate-, and voter-behaviour. However, in order to use all features of an electoral system as intended, voters must have a clear understanding of how their electoral system actually works. While earl...

The role of the “Big Five” personality traits in driving welfare state attitudes has received scant attention in social policy research. Yet neuroticism in particular—a disposition to stress, worry, and get nervous easily—is theoretically likely to be an important driver of welfare attitudes precisely because welfare states deliver social “security...

Are public sector workers more honest than their private sector counterparts? While conventional wisdom might suggest so, no direct evidence has been offered to address this question, as most public administration research has utilized indirect designs and measures. Furthermore, most studies on this topic have been conducted in a single country, th...

Die Verfügbarkeit kommunaler Wahldaten stellt im bundesdeutschen Kontext häufig noch eine Hürde für die empirische Wahl- und Policyforschung dar. Der in diesem Beitrag vorgestellte „NieKom“-Datensatz, bestehend aus einem scientific use file (https://uol.de/polsys/niekom) und einer Online-Informationsplattform (http://srvg03.offis.unioldenburg.de/ni...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht, wie die Kandidaten zur Bundestagswahl 2013 den Begriff „rechts“ interpretieren und welche Determinanten ihre Interpretation beeinflussen. In einem ersten Analyseschritt werden mithilfe eines Structural Topic Models die verschiedenen Interpretationen des Begriffs „rechts“ aus offenen Survey-Antworten extrahiert. In einem z...

Die Ausgestaltung von Wahlsystemen ist eine zentrale Frage jeder repräsentativen Demokratie. Es besteht weitgehender Konsens darüber, dass Wahlsysteme nicht sämtliche normativ wünschenswerten Eigenschaften gleichzeitig erfüllen können. Welche Zielfunktionen durch ein Wahlsystem erfüllt werden sollen, ist daher eine regelmäßig in Politik und Wissens...

In this research note, candidate survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) is used to analyse positional shifts of German Bundestag parties between 2013 and 2017. Two developments make Germany a particularly interesting case: (1) the liberal but also controversial policies of the Merkel cabinet during the European refugee crisi...

This study tests the effect of PSM and studying public administration on subjects' behavior in a repeated Public Goods Game with a costly option to punish free riders. Conducting the experiment on 136 students from three subject pools (public administration, social science and business science) shows the following: (1) PSM has a twofold effect, as...

Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorien gelten als erfolgversprechende Ansätze zur Erklärung sozialen und politischen Handelns. Handeln wird dabei als das Ergebnis eines Prozesses gesehen, bei dem Akteure aus verschiedenen verfügbaren Handlungsalternativen diejenige auswählen, die bei gegebenen Rahmenbedingungen und erwarteten Handlungen anderer Akteu...

Electoral systems are among the most important components of any democratic constitution, since the legitimacy of the electoral system is a precondition for the legitimacy of the electoral outcome and thereby for the stability of a democratic system as such. Public debates about electoral system change, however, are often dominated by the strategic...

Electoral system requires a broad social consensus in order to fulfill its democratic functions. This study therefore asks citizens the question of which electoral system they prefer. Specifically, we rely on a representative conjoint experiment conducted in Germany during the Federal Election of 2017 in which voters were asked to choose between tw...

This study tests the effect of studying public administration and self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) on risk preferences. We conduct a compound lottery choice experiment with monetary rewards to measure risk behavior and a post-experiment survey to measure risk attitudes and PSM on three student subject pools. Empirical findings suggest...

This study analyzes whether enabling people to get informed about redistributive consequences is an effective measure to prevent equivalence framing in the domain of voting on redistribution. Utilizing the redistribution mechanism of the Meltzer-Richard model, an equivalent frame is induced by letting subjects vote either on a proportional tax rate...

Utilizing a simplified version of the Meltzer–Richard redistribution mechanism, we designed a laboratory experiment to test whether it matters if voters were asked to decide on a tax rate or a minimum income, leaving the redistribution mechanism itself unchanged. Framing the vote about redistribution as a decision about a minimal income increases t...

This article explores the associations between self-reported Public Service Motivation (PSM) and preferred job traits, study choice, and observable prosocial behaviour. We studied three subject pools covering over 250 university students in Germany. We used laboratory experiments with monetary rewards to measure altruism, fairness, strategic fairne...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Interest in experimental research in public management is on the rise, yet the field still lacks a broad understanding of its role in producing substantive findings and theoretical advances. Written by a team of leading international researchers, this book sets out the advantages of experiments in public management and showcases their rapidly devel...

Die Ausgestaltung des Wahlsystems ist einer der einflussreichsten Faktoren politischer Systeme. Es besteht weitgehender Konsens darin, dass Wahlsysteme nicht sämtliche normativ wünschenswerten Eigenschaften gleichzeitig realisieren können. Welche Zielfunktionen durch ein Wahlsystem erfüllt werden sollen, ist daher eine regelmäßig in Politik und Wis...

The relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies is typically modeled as a principal-agent game. Legislators can acquire information about the (non-)compliance of bureaucrats at some specific cost. Previous studies consider the information from oversight to be perfect, which contradicts most real-world applications. We therefore provide a mo...

We examine whether exposure to several salient counterexamples reduces the effect of stereotypes on voting. By taking advantage of a series of seven plagiarism scandals in Germany—a country with high regard for academic credentials where academic titles (Dr. and Prof.) get printed on ballot papers—we test whether the tendency to vote for candidates...

Taking advantage of recent progress in simulation techniques, this study replicates and extends previous research on social heterogeneity and choice failure under Condorcet and Borda. The simulation results can be summarized in three points: First, under a uniform distribution of preference profiles (Impartial Culture, IC), Borda is less likely to...

This article analyzes conceptualizations of the terms "left" and "right" among parliamentary candidates in a multi-party system. Theoretically, we differentiate between the spatial theory of voting and semantic approaches in the field of political theory to explain how candidates provide meanings to these terms. By combining insights from both appr...

Taking advantage of recent progress in simulation techniques, this study replicates and extends previous research on social heterogeneity and choice failure under Condorcet and Borda. The simulation results can be summarized in three points: First, under a uniform distribution of preference profiles (Impartial culture, IC), Borda is less likely to...

This study applies black box scaling to the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey 2013 to shed light on an emerging right-wing party in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The scaling procedure extracts two meaningful and robust ideological dimensions described as socialism versus liberalism and libertarian versus authorit...

In this contribution, we address the question if and under which circumstances voters are able to identify the utility maximizing choice in multi-party systems with coalition governments. We choose a laboratory experiment with monetary incentives in order to construct different electoral scenarios and test the influence of the specific features of...

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 asso...

In this contribution, we address the question if and under which circumstances voters are able to identify the utility maximizing choice in multi-party systems with coalition governments. With help of a laboratory experiment we test the influence of specific variables on the likelihood of rational voting decisions. In accordance with our theoretica...

Bei Schneider und Tepe (Kapitel 9) stehen deshalb Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten, die sich bei der Bundestagswahl 2013 zur Wahl gestellt hatten, bezüglich ihrer Positionen zur Verantwortung und zu Lösungen für die ökonomische Krise im Mittelpunkt. Damit adressieren die Autoren Kernvoraussetzungen der repräsentativen Demokratie: die Frage nach einer D...

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...

In the introduction and in Chapter 2, we have discussed the shift from the traditional paradigm of the public employee as a civil servant to an emerging paradigm of the public employee as a provider of public services. In this vein, our core research question is: To what extent have European countries preserved a distinct status of public employees...

From an economic perspective, the network-based energy sector has traditionally been conceived of as a natural monopoly (Cameron 2007, pp. 21ff.). From a political perspective, after the Second World War, most OECD countries developed specific concepts of gas and electricity as public services that are essential for the well-being of society and th...

As noted earlier, scholarly debates agree that during the last decades, public administration regimes have undergone substantial change. The question of whether and how these changes have affected public employment is at the core of this study, assuming that public employment in the past was characterized by distinct features historically enshrined...

Waste collection is one of the long-established core public services provided at the local level. In many urban areas, public waste collection was established in the mid-19th century with the main aim of securing public health in an era of rapid urbanization and industrialization (Hafkamp 2002; Hemmer et al. 2003). Until the 1970s, municipal respon...

According to most categorizations in macro-comparative political economy and public administration, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, and Germany represent very different regimes. They all have established very specific variants of the territorial state securing the rule of law, upholding democracy, and intervening in society and economy, a count...

The societal role of the police is to prevent and fight crime, to maintain order, and to deliver a variety of related services to communities. Notwithstanding social and cultural differences (Hills 2009), the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force and its connection with what is called ‘policing a social order’ are societally accepted elem...

The term public employment refers to a large and heterogeneous group of employees who are directly or indirectly involved in the production and provision of publicly financed goods and services. This conceptual imprecision has made the term popular in political debates, but it limits its usefulness in analytical and scientific discourses. Thus, bef...

We start the first section by briefly summarizing important research traditions from which we draw insights for our own analysis of public employment regimes. The first subsection situates classifications of public employment regimes within the wider context of welfare regimes, capitalist systems, and public administration regimes. We then discuss...

The overview of quantitative developments and ‘milestone’ events in Chapter 4 has suggested that the general picture of public sector employment is one of rather rigid structures, slow processes, and contradictory trends. This conclusion, however, is the result of limited and incomplete aggregate-level data, which precludes a closer look into the p...

Policymakers generally have powerful incentives to attract votes by strategically manipulating public policies, for instance by increasing public spending during election periods or by implementing ideologically valued policies for their electoral base. At first sight, public theatres and orchestras appear an unlikely domain for such tactics. Highb...

The relationship between legislatures and bureaucracies is typically mod-eled as a principal-agent game. Legislators can acquire information about the (non-)compliance of bureaucrats at some specific cost. However, many studies consider the information from oversight as perfect, which contradicts most real-world applications. We therefore provide a...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die polit-ökonomischen Determinanten der Elternbeiträge für kommunale Kindergärten und diskutiert die Steuerungsfunktion und Politisierung der Beiträge. Erstens erklären strukturelle Rahmenbedingungen wie die Ausgaben des Landes für Kinder im Vorschulalter, das Schuldenniveau und die Bevölkerungsdichte die Beitragshöhe gem...

Previous political research on personality has largely focused on voting and partisan attitudes. This article explores the direct and the conditional relationship between the Big Five personality traits and welfare state attitudes in the context of five different areas or needs contexts for welfare provision. Using data from the German Socio-Econom...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die polit-ökonomischen Determinanten der Elternbeiträge für kommunale Kindergärten und diskutiert die Steuerungsfunktion und Politisierung der Beiträge. Erstens erklären strukturelle Rahmenbedingungen wie die Ausgaben des Landes für Kinder im Vorschulalter, das Schuldenniveau und die Bevölkerungsdichte die Beitragshöhe gem...

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,...

This study explores a refined model of public/private sector cleavage voting. Assuming that market and work experiences are crucial for people to develop common political views, it investigates three contexts that shape government employees' willingness to vote as a single constituency: the branch of public sector production, the occupational statu...

Verfahren der quantitativen Textanalyse wurden wiederholt erfolgreich genutzt, um politische Positionen aus Parteiprogrammen und parlamentarischen Reden zu extrahieren. Dieser Beitrag thematisiert die Übertragbarkeit der quantitativen Textanalyse auf neue Textkategorien am Beispiel der selbstverfassten Kurzbiographien der Bundestagsabgeordneten. Un...

Was verrät der Lebenslauf eines Abgeordneten über dessen politische Position? Die Autoren argumentieren, dass sich fraktions- und mandatsspezifische Rekrutierungsmuster im Vokabular der von den Abgeordneten verfassten Kurzbiographien niederschlagen. Die Skalierung der Texte mit Wordfish ergibt, dass die aus den Kurzbiographien abgeleiteten Fraktion...

This article explores the diverging roles of leftwing parties and trade unions in determining active labor market program (ALMP) spending. We argue that unions today increasingly take into account the distinct re-employability worries of their members. Rather than as a labor market outsider program, unions now consider ALMPs, especially those sub-p...

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...

This chapter presents an analysis of the impacts of family policy regimes and of family solidarity on young people’s attitudes towards public childcare across 21 advanced industrial democracies. We test these explanations by applying binary logit regressions to the ISSP Social Networks II (2001) for 21 OECD countries. Estimation results are consist...

This study explores the extent to which voters use candidates' PhD title as a heuristic to reduce the effort of voting. Besides the direct effect of a PhD title on candidates' electoral results, we explore four contexts that might shape the importance of the PhD heuristic. Estimation results on the basis of direct candidates in the German Federal E...

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 se...

This article examines the relationship between public administration regulation and market economy models in 20 OECD countries. Building on Pollitt and Bouckaert's (2004) administrative dimension, we employ explorative statistical analysis to identify three distinct public administration regimes: an Anglo-American, a French/German and a Scandinavia...

This paper investigates the politics of delays in pension generosity cutbacks in 18 OECD democracies between 1981 and 1999 by using event history analysis. In the context of fiscal austerity, policymakers are assumed to have a strong incentive to manipulate the timing of cutbacks strategically. Investigating both medium and large cutbacks in ageing...

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, we test whether partisa...