No abstract

Purpose The recent increase in economic inequalities in many countries heightened the debates about policy preferences on income distribution. Attitudes toward inequality vary greatly across countries and numerous explanations are offered to clarify the factors leading to support for redistribution. The purpose of this paper is to examine the link between subjective social class and redistributive demands by jointly considering the individual and national factors. The author argues that subjective measures of social positions can be highly explanatory for preferences about redistribution policies. Design/methodology/approach The author uses data from 48 countries gathered by World Values Survey and empirically tests the impact of self-positioning into classes by multilevel ordered logit model. Several model specifications and estimation strategies have been employed to obtain consistent estimates and to check for the robustness of the results. Findings The findings show that, in addition to objective factors, subjective class status is highly explanatory for redistributive preferences across countries. The author also exhibits that there is interaction between self-ranking of social status and national context. The author’s estimations from the multilevel models verify that subjective social class has greater explanatory power in more equal societies. This is in contrast to the previous studies that establish a positive link between inequality and redistribution. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature by introducing subjective social class as a determinant. Self-ranked positions can be very relieving about policy preferences given the information these categorizations encompass about individuals’ perceptions about their and others’ place in the society.

The paper analyses the determinants of public opinion on flexibilisation of work contracts. While the literature on new labour market divides has rapidly expanded, few contributions directly look at employees’ demands for labour market regulation. By using a multi‐level data set for 25 European countries, we find that the subjectively assessed job security is an important and valuable predictor of preferences for flexibilisation. In particular, those with very low and very high levels of perceived job security prefer flexibilisation compared to those with medium levels. We also show that the effect is stronger in countries with stricter employment protection legislation. The findings contribute to the literature on new divides of labour market politics in several ways. First, our empirical operationalization is related directly to the core of insider‐outsider theory, the protection of work contracts. Second, subjective assessment of employment security yields important complementary insights into a debate usually focusing on objective measures. Third, we find that the (subjective) divide is context dependent; it is much more visible in countries where employment protection regulation is strong.

The paper estimates the wage gap between employees with different contract types in Turkey. We first employ a quantile regression method and then decompose wage differentials along the distribution. Our results indicate that nonpermanent contract holders are more common among the low-skilled and low-wage group. The findings imply a non-monotone pattern in Turkey where both sticky floor and glass ceiling effects are observable. These effects are persistent over time as both bottom-and topearner temporary workers are penalized, and the wage gap displays almost no change for each group. Also, from the quantile decomposition, we reveal that the wage gap for low earners is mainly attributable to labor market characteristics. On the other hand, returns are primarily responsible for explaining the wage gap for high earners, suggesting that they are subject to unfavorable conditions in the labor market.

Labour in Central-Eastern Europe is widely regarded as a uniformly weak actor. We challenge this view, and explore the conditions under which CEE labour can play an active role in the welfare reform process. We draw on evidence from education and health care in Poland and Serbia, and show that public sector unions have largely retained their ability to prevent major restructuring and to defend employment-related privileges of their constituencies. The unions' resilience is explained by the fact that the public sector in these countries remains sheltered from competitive pressures by delayed privatization, and by the extensive structural and associational power enjoyed by public sector employees.