Cross-border welfare rights for citizens of European Union member states are intensely contested, yet there is limited research into voter opposition to such rights, sometimes denoted ‘welfare chauvinism’. We highlight an overlooked aspect in scholarly work: the role of stereotypes about beneficiaries of cross-border welfare. We present results from an original large-scale survey experiment (N=2525) among Swedish voters, randomizing exposure to cues about recipients' country of origin and family size. Consistent with a model emphasizing the role of stereotypes, respondents react to cues about recipient identity. These effects are strongest among respondents high in ethnic prejudice and economic conservatism. The findings imply that stereotypes about who benefits from cross-border welfare rights condition public support for those rights.
We investigate the usefulness of the dice game paradigm to public administration as a standardized way of measuring (dis)honesty among individuals, groups, and societies. Measures of dishonesty are key for the field’s progress in understanding individual, organizational, and societal differences in unethical behavior and corruption. We first describe the dice game paradigm and its advantages and then discuss a range of considerations for how to implement it. Next, we highlight the potential of the dice game paradigm across two diverse studies: prospective public employees in Denmark (n = 441) and prospective public employees in 10 different countries with very different levels of corruption (n = 1,091). In the first study, we show how individual-level behavioral dishonesty is very strongly negatively correlated with public service motivation. In the second study, we find that widely used country-level indicators of corruption are strongly correlated with the average behavioral dishonesty among prospective public employees. The results illustrate the importance of the validated dice game paradigm to shed light on core questions that link micro- and macro-level dynamics of dishonesty and corruption in the public sector.
We study the role of self-selection into public service in sustaining honesty in the public sector. Focusing on the world’s least corrupt country, Denmark, we use a survey experiment to document strong self-selection of more honest individuals into public service. This result differs sharply from existing findings from more corrupt settings. Differences in pro-social versus pecuniary motivation appear central to the observed selection pattern. Dishonest individuals are more pecuniarily motivated and self-select out of public service into higher-paying private sector jobs. Accordingly, we find that increasing public sector wages would attract more dishonest candidates to public service in Denmark. (JEL D73, H83, J31, J45)
Recent studies of economic voting have focused on the role of the local economy, but with inconclusive results. We argue that while local economic conditions affect incumbent support on average, the importance of the local economy varies by citizens’ interactions with it. More recent and frequent encounters with aspects of the local economy make those aspects more salient and, in turn, feature more prominently in evaluations of the incumbent government. We label this process “context priming.” We provide evidence for these propositions by studying local housing markets. Linking granularly detailed data on housing prices from Danish public registries to both precinct-level election returns and an individual-level panel survey, we find that when individuals interact with the housing market, their support for the incumbent government is more responsive to changes in local housing prices. The study thus provides a framework for understanding when citizens respond politically to the local economy.
Are country-level differences in corruption related to the dishonesty level of individuals entering public service? Recent studies have found that dishonest individuals self-select into public service in high-corruption settings. Little is known, however, about what is driving this pattern and whether a similar pattern exists in low-corruption settings. This paper examines selection into public service in the world's least corrupt country, Denmark. We subject a relevant student population to a standard experimental dishonesty task and develop a novel method to estimate individual-level dishonesty from the experimental data. We then relate estimates of dishonesty to subjects' job preferences and characteristics. In contrast to previous findings, dishonest individuals in low-corruption Denmark are less likely to want to enter public service. This self-selection is not related to risk-aversion or ability. Instead, we find that dishonest individuals who self-select into higher paid private sector careers such as finance are less altruistic and place a higher weight on their own earning opportunities. Accordingly, counterfactual wage questions suggest that higher public sector wages would attract more dishonest candidates to the public sector in Denmark.
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