What do citizens of the United States and Germany think about their schools and school policies? This paper offers the first broad comparison of public thinking on education in the two countries. We carried out opinion surveys of representative samples of the German and American adult...

In diesem Jahr hat das ifo Bildungsbarometer zum zweiten Mal die deutsche Bevölkerung nach ihrer Meinung zu bildungspolitischen Themen befragt. Quer durch die Bildungsphasen zeigt sich dabei eine erstaunliche Reformbereitschaft. Es zeigt nicht weniger als zehn bildungspolitische Themen, bei...

The electorates' lack of information about the extent of public spending may cause misalignments between voters' preferences and the size of government. We devise a series of representative survey experiments in Germany that randomly provide treatment groups with information on current spending...

To study whether current spending levels and public knowledge of them contribute to transatlantic differences in policy preferences, we implement parallel survey experiments in Germany and the United States. In both countries, support for increased education spending and teacher salaries falls...

The electorates' lack of information about the extent of public spending may cause misalignments between voters' preferences and the size of government. We devise a series of representative survey experiments in Germany that randomly provide treatment groups with information on current spending...

A general concern with the representativeness of online surveys is that they exclude the “offline” population that does not use the internet. We run a large-scale opinion survey with (1) onliners in web mode, (2) offliners in face-to-face mode, and (3) onliners in face-to-face mode. We find...

To study how information about educational inequality affects public concerns and policy preferences, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German population. Providing information about the extent of educational inequality strongly increases concerns about educational...

A general concern with the representativeness of online surveys is that they exclude the "offline" population that does not use the internet. We run a large-scale opinion survey with (1) onliners in web mode, (2) offliners in face-to-face mode, and (3) onliners in face-to-face mode. We find...

The standard assumption of exogenous policy preferences implies that parties set their positions according to their voters’ preferences. We investigate the reverse effect: Are the electorates’ policy preferences responsive to party positions? In a representative German survey, we inform...

A large literature studies subjective beliefs about economic facts using unincentivized survey questions. We devise randomized experiments in a representative online survey to investigate whether incentivizing belief accuracy affects stated beliefs about average earnings by professional degree...