IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ces/ifowps/_391.html

Politicians’ Social Welfare Criteria – An Experiment with German Legislators

Author

Listed:
  • Sandro Ambuehl
  • Sebastian Blesse
  • Philipp Doerrenberg
  • Christoph Feldhaus
  • Axel Ockenfels

Abstract

Much economic analysis derives policy recommendations based on social welfare criteria intended to model the preferences of a policy maker. Yet, little is known about policy maker's normative views in a way amenable to this use. In a behavioral experiment, we elicit German legislators' social welfare criteria unconfounded by political economy constraints. When resolving preference conflicts across individuals, politicians place substantially more importance on least-favored than on most-favored alternatives, contrasting with both common aggregation mechanisms and the equal weighting inherent in utilitarianism and the Kaldor-Hicks criterion. When resolving preference conflicts within individuals, we find no support for the commonly used "long-run criterion" which insists that choices merit intervention only if the lure of immediacy may bias intertemporal choice. Politicians' and the public's social welfare criteria largely coincide.

Suggested Citation

  • Sandro Ambuehl & Sebastian Blesse & Philipp Doerrenberg & Christoph Feldhaus & Axel Ockenfels, 2023. "Politicians’ Social Welfare Criteria – An Experiment with German Legislators," ifo Working Paper Series 391, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifowps:_391
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/wp-2023-391-ambuehl-etal-social-welfare-criteria.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrej Woerner & Taisuke Imai & Davide D. Pace & Klaus M. Schmidt, 2024. "How to increase public support for carbon pricing with revenue recycling," Nature Sustainability, Nature, vol. 7(12), pages 1633-1641, December.
    2. Bayer Christian & Bierbrauer Felix & Ockenfels Axel & Sutter Matthias, 2025. "ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy: Agenda und ausgewählte Forschungsschwerpunkte," Perspektiven der Wirtschaftspolitik, De Gruyter, vol. 26(1), pages 34-48.
    3. Arlinghaus, Johanna Brigitte & Konc, Théo & Mattauch, Linus & Sommer, Stephan, 2024. "The effect of information framing on policy support: Experimental evidence from urban policies," VfS Annual Conference 2024 (Berlin): Upcoming Labor Market Challenges 302449, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • C90 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - General
    • D60 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ifowps:_391. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifooode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.