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 in debates about electoral systems. Consequently, our contribution presents results of citizens’ demands regarding electoral system attributes. Specifically, we rely on a large-scale conjoint experiment conducted in Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK in which subjects were asked to choose between two electoral systems which randomly differed on a set of attributes referring to electoral systems’ core functions. Our results show that all core functions are generally of importance for the respondents but reveal a higher preference for proportional electoral systems. These preferences are largely stable for citizens in different countries but also for other subgroups of subjects.

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 the individually and ideally preferred level of redistribution. This effect outlives the groups’ deliberation processes and leads to the implementation of a higher level of redistribution.

In times of an alleged waning of political business cycles and partisan policy-making, vote-seeking policy-makers 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, are a promising domain for such tactics. Timing the hiring of police officers during election periods may increase votes, as these are “street-visible” jobs dealing with politically salient issues. Law-and-order competence signalling makes police hiring especially attractive for conservative parties. Testing these electioneering and partisanship hypotheses in the German states between 1992 and 2010, we find that socio-economic variables such as population density strongly determine police employment. But incumbents also hire more police officers before elections, while conservative party power increases police numbers. Subjectively “immediate” forms of crime (issue salience) and perceived causes of crime such as immigration are also positively associated with police numbers.

In order to explain why people differ in their attitudes towards public childcare, we present a theoretical framework that integrates four causal mechanisms: regime socialisation, political ideology, family involvement and material self-interest. Estimation results obtained from multivariate regressions on the 2002 German General Social Survey and replications on the 2008/9 European Social Survey can be condensed into three statements: (1) Regime socialisation is the single most important determinant of attitudes toward public childcare, followed by young age as an indicator of self-interest and political ideology. Family involvement does not have any sizeable impact. (2) Regime socialisation conditions the impact of some indicators of political ideology and family involvement on attitudes toward public childcare. (3) Despite a paradigmatic shift in policy, the dynamics of 2008 mirror those of 2002, highlighting the stability of inter-individual differences in support. The results suggest that the ‘shadow of communism’ still stretches over what people in the East expect from the welfare state and that individual difference in the demand for public childcare appears to be highly path-dependent.

Since 1990 the age of the average OECD median voter has increased three times faster than in the preceding 30 years. We use panel data from 1980–2002 to investigate the effects of population aging on both the program size and the benefit generosity of public pensions in 18 OECD countries. Population aging is accompanied by cutting smaller slices out of larger cakes: it increases aggregate spending on pensions but freezes or decreases the generosity of individual benefits. Controlling for political, institutional and time-period effects, we find that public pension efforts are significantly mediated by welfare regime type. Moreover, since the late 1980s pension effort has more fully adopted a retrenchment logic. It is the politics of fiscal and electoral straitjackets, not gerontocracy, which shape public pension spending today. While population aging is accelerating, contrary to alarmist political economy predictions democracies are not yet dominated by a new distributive politics of elderly power.