Sven Hillen

• Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Seminal models in political economy imply that rising economic inequality should lead to growing public demand for redistribution. Yet, existing empirical evidence on this link is both limited and inconclusive – and scholars regularly doubt it exists at all. In this research note, we turn to data from the International Social Survey Programme's (IS...

Does it (still) make a difference to welfare policy whether left or right parties hold government? Do left governments pursue more expansionary policies than their right counterparts? This dissertation project investigates these familiar yet still contested questions with a focus on how political competition shapes the effects of government partisa...

Whether parties matter for welfare policy is debated in comparative research. This article argues that one reason for dwindling partisan effects is that with the rising salience of cultural issues, political conflict has become increasingly two-dimensional. The argument expects parties to be more prone to shape welfare policy in ways expected by pa...

Often lacking parties with a corresponding profile, citizens with economically left and culturally authoritarian, or nationalist, policy orientations face a trade-off between congruence on economic and on cultural issues. How such left-authoritarian voters resolve this trade-off depends on which issues are more salient to them, previous research ar...

Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht die Gruppe der „links-autoritär“ eingestellten Bürger, die ökonomisch linke mit soziokulturell autoritären Sachfragenpositionen kombinieren. Da keine der relevanten deutschen Parteien eine solche Positionierung aufweist, sind links-autoritäre Bürger von einer Angebotslücke betroffen. Vor diesem Hintergrund fragen...

Parties with left‐wing positions on economic issues and right‐wing (i.e., authoritarian) positions on cultural issues have been historically largely absent from the supply side of the policy space of Western European democracies. Yet, many citizens hold such left‐authoritarian issue attitudes. This article addresses the hypotheses that left‐authori...

Die Parteiendifferenztheorie geht davon aus, dass die Sozialpolitik linker und rechter Regierungen sich unterscheidet, weil ihre jeweiligen Elektorate unterschiedliche sozialpolitische Präferenzen haben. Die sozialstrukturelle Zusammensetzung dieser Elektorate hat sich jedoch im Laufe der letzten Jahrzehnte stark verändert. Die Implikationen dieser...

The effects of left governing parties on the welfare state are contested in the literature. To date no study considered voter turnout as a moderator of partisan effects. Low turnout rates generally mean socio-economically unequal turnout rates, since low income citizens have a higher probability of non-voting. At the same time, low income groups ar...