PhD Projects

Who Benefits, Where and Why? Drivers of Local Resource Allocation in Germany (Under Review)

Local politics are the level of government often considered to be the closest to citizens, in large parts because they are responsible for the allocation of public goods that are important for everyday life. Naturally, how local governments decide to allocate these public goods has been the subject of extensive scholarship. Early research had suggested that, unlike higher levels of government, local politics are driven by ‘unpolitical’ processes and motivations. More recent work has shaken this consensus, suggesting that local resource allocation is indeed affected by political considerations. However, which exact political processes or motivations underlie allocation decisions remains an open question. So far, most studies have been limited to testing individual drivers, without accounting for competing alternatives. This study aims to close this research gap by investigating two possible explanations: Distributive politics, which describes that politicians allocate resources in order to improve their chances of reelection, and unequal responsiveness, which describes that the priorities of some socioeconomic groups are better represented than those of others. Based on previous findings, I hypothesize that local politicians target their core voters and high-turnout voters over others, and that they are more responsive to the rich than to the poor. This study draws on a novel dataset covering 20 German cities over 16 years and three election cycles, using much more comprehensive data than earlier research. Regarding distributive politics, results suggest that local politicians do not target their core voters or high turnout voters. My results on unequal responsiveness are ambiguous, but ultimately provide no evidence for unequal responsiveness to be a driver of local resource allocation. I discuss the implications of these results with regards to the literature and suggest avenues for future research.

Do Local Governments Favor Richer Citizens? Unequal Responsiveness in Brazil and South Africa (with Letícia Barbabela, Miquel Pellicer, and Eva Wegner; Under Review)

This paper examines unequal responsiveness in Brazil and South Africa—two of the most unequal countries in the world. While most studies on unequal responsiveness have focused on high-income democracies, we extend this research to middle-income contexts and to the local level, where disparities in public service provision directly affect citizens’ daily lives. Building on a classic conceptualization of the components of responsiveness, we distinguish between policy responsiveness—the extent to which government spending priorities align with citizens’ preferences—and allocation responsiveness—the extent to which spending is geographically distributed according to citizens’ socioeconomic needs. In Study 1, we analyze whether municipal spending across policy areas follows the stated priorities of richer versus poorer citizens, using locally representative surveys and municipal budget data by policy area. In Study 2, we assess whether richer or poorer neighborhoods receive more municipal resources, using spatially disaggregated spending data from South African metropolitan municipalities and geocoded public construction projects in Brazilian cities. Across both countries, we find both types of political inequality. Our findings contribute empirically by extending the unequal responsiveness literature to local politics in middle-income democracies, and conceptually by distinguishing between policy and allocation responsiveness. More broadly, the paper bridges the unequal responsiveness and distributive politics literatures.

Deserving a Tax Cut: Constructing Target-Groups and the Legitimation of Regressive Tax Policy (Work in Progress)

How do political elites publicly justify tax policies that disproportionately benefit the wealthy? This article examines the rhetorical strategies German MPs used to defend two regressive inheritance-tax reforms (2008, 2016) that substantially reduced effective tax burdens on inherited business wealth. Applying Blum and Kuhlmann’s (2025) integrated SCTP–CARIN framework to 56 Bundestag speeches, I show how MPs mobilised deservingness narratives, especially criteria of control, reciprocity, and identity, to construct family businesses as morally worthy beneficiaries while casting wealthy heirs and large corporations as powerful but less deserving. Lower-income groups and the middle class, by contrast, were routinely praised as hard-working and modest yet remained largely excluded from material benefits. The analysis reveals systematic partisan differences: conservative MPs emphasised national embeddedness and job creation to justify exemptions, whereas left parties stressed unearned wealth and unfair advantage to contest them. The findings demonstrate that deservingness framing is not confined to welfare targeting but operates as a broader rhetorical strategy through which elites make upward redistribution politically speakable in tax policy.

Background or Banner? Socio-Economic Origins, Business Ties, and Positions on Inheritance-Tax Reform in Germany Media (Work in Progress)

Political elites who shape tax legislation are difficult to study because their preferences are filtered through party discipline, closed-door bargaining, and strategic communication. I leverage public statements reported in the media as an observable trace of elite positioning during the German inheritance-tax reform debate around 2016. I assemble a corpus of 675 coded statements from roughly 500 articles by agenda-setting actors (N = 89), and link each actor to socio-economic background indicators and potential material interests (including business ties). I test whether these traits predict (i) expressed positions and (ii) deviations from party baselines. Across statement- and actor-level models, partisan affiliation structures the vast majority of variation in stance. Apparent effects of business background and biography in bivariate comparisons largely reflect between-party composition rather than systematic within-party differences: once party baselines (and media-outlet context) are accounted for, background effects shrink substantially and are typically not statistically distinguishable from zero. The findings clarify when personal interests translate into public position-taking on distributive tax reforms and offer a replicable measurement strategy for inferring elite positioning in hard-to-observe legislative settings.