Philipp Rehm
Biographic Data
| ID | 116770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philipp Rehm |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philipp |
| FAMILY NAME | Rehm |
| SIGNATURE | REHM P |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6026-824X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1124 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Why No Left-Authoritarian Parties
The puzzle posed by the lack of viable parties in Western democracies in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional space likely has demand- as well as supply-side explanations. This paper focuses on the demand side and argues that left-authoritarian voters are internally divided by the extent to which they combine two distinct non-economic preferences: views on the socio-political order (libertarian vs. authoritarian) and views on immi…
Class experiences and the long-term evolution of economic values
While there is a strong cross-sectional association between social class and political attitudes, recent research-based on longitudinal data-finds that changes in class are, at most, weakly related to changes in such attitudes. One common explanation for this finding is that early life socialization affects both social class and political attitudes and that class has little, if any, direct effect on them. In this manuscript, we explore an alterna…
Long‐term income trajectories and the evolution of political attitudes
Income and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross‐sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long‐term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, ant…
Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies
This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups-based on the interaction of these two dichot…
Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. L…
Big Data and the Welfare State
Information and Financialization: Credit Markets as a New Source of Inequality
Driven by financialization and rising demand for credit, household sector debt in OECD countries has risen sharply. We argue that this rise in private debt has become a significant driver of inequality because access to, and the terms of, credit vary by the risk of default, which is closely tied to income. The effect is magnified by a trove of new data that allow lenders to more accurately assess individual risks, thereby linking interest rates m…
Reducing Risk as well as Inequality: Assessing the Welfare State's Insurance Effects
Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures,risk incidenceandrisk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existin…
Political Participation
This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions…
The Future of Welfare State Politics
This essay argues that several ongoing and future developments are likely to undermine the broad public support welfare states historically and currently enjoy. These developments—skill-biased technological change, privatization of pensions, higher rates of assortative mating, and the information revolution—can be expected to increase risk inequality, the predictability of risk, income and wealth inequality, and the overlap between income and ris…
Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era
White American voters have realigned among the two dominant parties by income and education levels. This article argues that the interaction of education and income provides a more insightful-and stark-display of this change than treating them individually. Each group of voters is associated with distinctive 'first dimension' views of economic redistribution and 'second dimension' preferences concerning salient sociopolitical issues of civic and …
Political participation
This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions…
Risk Inequality and Welfare States: Social Policy Preferences, Development, and Dynamics
The transformation of night-watchman states into welfare states is one of the most notable societal developments in recent history. In 1880, not a single country had a nationally compulsory social policy program. A few decades later, every single one of today's rich democracies had adopted programs covering all or almost all of the main risks people face: old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. These programs rapidly expanded in terms of r…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Occupations as a Site of Political Preference Formation
Political preferences are multi-dimensional, covering topics like redistribution, immigration, and abortion. But what accounts for people’s political preferences? We argue that an individual’s work experiences on the job play an important part in shaping attitudes. In a process of generalization and transposition, people apply the kinds of reasoning, heuristics, and problem-solving techniques they learn and use at work in all realms of life. In t…
The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment
Journal Article The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment Get access Anne Wren, Anne Wren 1Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Philipp Rehm Philipp Rehm * 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar So…
Service Expansion, International Exposure, and Political Preferences
In this chapter, Wren and Rehm show that, in tandem with the process of deindustrialization itself, one of the most striking demographic changes which has occurred in the labor markets of the economically advanced democracies since the 1970s has been the movement of large numbers of highly skilled workers from sheltered professional jobs in “welfare” sectors (such as government, education, and health) to highly paid positions in private and inter…
The Insecure American: Economic Experiences, Financial Worries, and Policy Attitudes
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation o…
Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State
Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations-vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state-reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged an…
Risk Inequality and the Polarized American Electorate
Why has the American political landscape grown more partisan since the 1970s? This article provides a novel account of the determinants of partisanship. The author argues that partisanship is not only shaped by the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income (risk exposure): rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low risk exposure) are ‘cross-pressured’; while…
Social Policy by Popular Demand
Why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries? This article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance. As a result, the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy-making. At the microlevel, the article shows that, in addition to income, the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual-level preferences for unemployment b…
United we stand: Constituency homogeneity and comparative party polarization
Risks and Redistribution: An Individual-Level Analysis
Much of the disagreement in the debate about globalization and its present or absent effects on the welfare state stems from competing assumptions about the individual-level determinants of redistributional preferences. This article calls for and provides testing of these causal mechanisms at the individual level. Traditional accounts suggest that risks at the industry level are important determinants of redistributional preferences. This article…
New social risk and political preferences
Citizens may try to calculate the magnitude of the expected stream of income they expect to receive in a pure system of voluntary market exchange, when they develop preferences among alternative social and economic policies. That expected stream of income results from the interaction of the magnitude and the certainty of income flows under conditions of market contracting. People whose income flow is small and/or uncertain have lower expected inc…
Risks at Work: The Demand and Supply Sides of Government Redistribution
To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To…
Risks and Redistribution: An Individual-Level Analysis
Much of the disagreement in the debate about globalization and its present or absent effects on the welfare state stems from competing assumptions about the individual-level determinants of redistributional preferences. This article calls for and provides testing of these causal mechanisms at the individual level. Traditional accounts suggest that risks at the industry level are important determinants of redistributional preferences. This article…
Occupations as a Site of Political Preference Formation
Political preferences are multi-dimensional, covering topics like redistribution, immigration, and abortion. But what accounts for people’s political preferences? We argue that an individual’s work experiences on the job play an important part in shaping attitudes. In a process of generalization and transposition, people apply the kinds of reasoning, heuristics, and problem-solving techniques they learn and use at work in all realms of life. In t…
Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State
Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations-vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state-reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged an…
Social Policy by Popular Demand
Why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries? This article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance. As a result, the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy-making. At the microlevel, the article shows that, in addition to income, the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual-level preferences for unemployment b…
The Insecure American: Economic Experiences, Financial Worries, and Policy Attitudes
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation o…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies
This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups-based on the interaction of these two dichot…
Risk Inequality and the Polarized American Electorate
Why has the American political landscape grown more partisan since the 1970s? This article provides a novel account of the determinants of partisanship. The author argues that partisanship is not only shaped by the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income (risk exposure): rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low risk exposure) are ‘cross-pressured’; while…
Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era
White American voters have realigned among the two dominant parties by income and education levels. This article argues that the interaction of education and income provides a more insightful-and stark-display of this change than treating them individually. Each group of voters is associated with distinctive 'first dimension' views of economic redistribution and 'second dimension' preferences concerning salient sociopolitical issues of civic and …
United we stand: Constituency homogeneity and comparative party polarization
Long‐term income trajectories and the evolution of political attitudes
Income and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross‐sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long‐term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, ant…
Reducing Risk as well as Inequality: Assessing the Welfare State's Insurance Effects
Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures,risk incidenceandrisk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existin…
Information and Financialization: Credit Markets as a New Source of Inequality
Driven by financialization and rising demand for credit, household sector debt in OECD countries has risen sharply. We argue that this rise in private debt has become a significant driver of inequality because access to, and the terms of, credit vary by the risk of default, which is closely tied to income. The effect is magnified by a trove of new data that allow lenders to more accurately assess individual risks, thereby linking interest rates m…
The Future of Welfare State Politics
This essay argues that several ongoing and future developments are likely to undermine the broad public support welfare states historically and currently enjoy. These developments—skill-biased technological change, privatization of pensions, higher rates of assortative mating, and the information revolution—can be expected to increase risk inequality, the predictability of risk, income and wealth inequality, and the overlap between income and ris…
The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment
Journal Article The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment Get access Anne Wren, Anne Wren 1Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Philipp Rehm Philipp Rehm * 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar So…
Class experiences and the long-term evolution of economic values
While there is a strong cross-sectional association between social class and political attitudes, recent research-based on longitudinal data-finds that changes in class are, at most, weakly related to changes in such attitudes. One common explanation for this finding is that early life socialization affects both social class and political attitudes and that class has little, if any, direct effect on them. In this manuscript, we explore an alterna…
Risks at Work: The Demand and Supply Sides of Government Redistribution
Citizen Support for the Welfare State: Determinants of Preferences for Income Redistribution
Risks at Work: The Demand and Supply Sides of Government Redistribution
To understand how the welfare state adjusts to economic shocks it is important to explain both the genesis of popular preferences and the institutional incentives of governments to respond to these preferences. This paper attempts to do both, using a general theoretical framework and detailed data at both the individual and national levels. In a first step, we focus on how risk exposure and income are related to preferences for redistribution. To…
New social risk and political preferences
Citizens may try to calculate the magnitude of the expected stream of income they expect to receive in a pure system of voluntary market exchange, when they develop preferences among alternative social and economic policies. That expected stream of income results from the interaction of the magnitude and the certainty of income flows under conditions of market contracting. People whose income flow is small and/or uncertain have lower expected inc…
Risks and Redistribution: An Individual-Level Analysis
Much of the disagreement in the debate about globalization and its present or absent effects on the welfare state stems from competing assumptions about the individual-level determinants of redistributional preferences. This article calls for and provides testing of these causal mechanisms at the individual level. Traditional accounts suggest that risks at the industry level are important determinants of redistributional preferences. This article…
United we stand: Constituency homogeneity and comparative party polarization
Risk Inequality and the Polarized American Electorate
Why has the American political landscape grown more partisan since the 1970s? This article provides a novel account of the determinants of partisanship. The author argues that partisanship is not only shaped by the traditionally suggested socio-economic factors, but also by the uncertainty of future income (risk exposure): rich individuals facing a high degree of risk exposure (or poor people facing low risk exposure) are ‘cross-pressured’; while…
Social Policy by Popular Demand
Why are unemployment benefits more generous in some countries? This article argues that citizens trade off the redistributive and insuring effect of social insurance. As a result, the distribution of risk in a society has important consequences via popular demand for social policy-making. At the microlevel, the article shows that, in addition to income, the risk of unemployment is a key predictor of individual-level preferences for unemployment b…
Insecure Alliances: Risk, Inequality, and Support for the Welfare State
Popular support for the welfare state varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue that these variations-vital to understanding the politics of the welfare state-reflect in part the degree to which economic disadvantage (low income) and economic insecurity (high risk) are correlated. When the disadvantaged and insecure are mostly one and the same, the base of popular support for the welfare state is narrow. When the disadvantaged an…
Service Expansion, International Exposure, and Political Preferences
In this chapter, Wren and Rehm show that, in tandem with the process of deindustrialization itself, one of the most striking demographic changes which has occurred in the labor markets of the economically advanced democracies since the 1970s has been the movement of large numbers of highly skilled workers from sheltered professional jobs in “welfare” sectors (such as government, education, and health) to highly paid positions in private and inter…
The Insecure American: Economic Experiences, Financial Worries, and Policy Attitudes
Even before the sharp downturn that began in 2007, many Americans were concerned about economic risks. Yet this widespread public concern has not been matched by attention from political scientists regarding how citizens experience and understand the economic risks they face or how those experiences and understandings shape their views of public policy. We develop here an argument about the role of personal economic experiences in the formation o…
Occupations as a Site of Political Preference Formation
Political preferences are multi-dimensional, covering topics like redistribution, immigration, and abortion. But what accounts for people’s political preferences? We argue that an individual’s work experiences on the job play an important part in shaping attitudes. In a process of generalization and transposition, people apply the kinds of reasoning, heuristics, and problem-solving techniques they learn and use at work in all realms of life. In t…
The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment
Journal Article The end of the consensus? Labour market developments and the politics of retrenchment Get access Anne Wren, Anne Wren 1Trinity College Dublin, College Green, Dublin 2, Ireland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Philipp Rehm Philipp Rehm * 2The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA *Correspondence: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar So…
Risk Inequality and Welfare States: Social Policy Preferences, Development, and Dynamics
The transformation of night-watchman states into welfare states is one of the most notable societal developments in recent history. In 1880, not a single country had a nationally compulsory social policy program. A few decades later, every single one of today's rich democracies had adopted programs covering all or almost all of the main risks people face: old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment. These programs rapidly expanded in terms of r…
Who Gives, Who Gains? Progressivity and Preferences
The extent to which popular support for the welfare state depends on income varies greatly across nations and policy domains. We argue and show formally that these variations—largely overlooked yet essential to understanding the politics of redistribution—reflect in part the design of tax and transfer policies in terms of progressivity. When progressivity is high, politics is perceived by income groups as a zero sum game and conflicts over who ge…
Political participation
This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions…
Secular Partisan Realignment in the United States: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of White Partisan Support since the New Deal Era
White American voters have realigned among the two dominant parties by income and education levels. This article argues that the interaction of education and income provides a more insightful-and stark-display of this change than treating them individually. Each group of voters is associated with distinctive 'first dimension' views of economic redistribution and 'second dimension' preferences concerning salient sociopolitical issues of civic and …
Political Participation
This chapter examines four fundamental questions relating to political participation. First, it considers different modes of political participation such as social movements, interest groups, and political parties. Second, it analyses the determinants of political participation, focusing in particular on the paradox of collective action. Third, it explains political participation at the macro-level in order to identify which contextual conditions…
The Future of Welfare State Politics
This essay argues that several ongoing and future developments are likely to undermine the broad public support welfare states historically and currently enjoy. These developments—skill-biased technological change, privatization of pensions, higher rates of assortative mating, and the information revolution—can be expected to increase risk inequality, the predictability of risk, income and wealth inequality, and the overlap between income and ris…
Big Data and the Welfare State: How the Information Revolution Threatens Social Solidarity
A core principle of the welfare state is that everyone pays taxes or contributions in exchange for universal insurance against social risks such as sickness, old age, unemployment, and plain bad luck. This solidarity principle assumes that everyone is a member of a single national insurance pool, and it is commonly explained by poor and asymmetric information, which undermines markets and creates the perception that we are all in the same boat. L…
Big Data and the Welfare State
Information and Financialization: Credit Markets as a New Source of Inequality
Driven by financialization and rising demand for credit, household sector debt in OECD countries has risen sharply. We argue that this rise in private debt has become a significant driver of inequality because access to, and the terms of, credit vary by the risk of default, which is closely tied to income. The effect is magnified by a trove of new data that allow lenders to more accurately assess individual risks, thereby linking interest rates m…
Reducing Risk as well as Inequality: Assessing the Welfare State's Insurance Effects
Leading accounts of the politics of the welfare state focus on societal demands for risk-spreading policies. Yet current measures of the welfare state focus not on risk, but on inequality. To address this gap, this letter describes the development of two new measures,risk incidenceandrisk reduction, which correspond to the prevalence of large income losses and the degree to which welfare states reduce that prevalence, respectively. Unlike existin…
Long‐term income trajectories and the evolution of political attitudes
Income and political attitudes are powerfully correlated in cross‐sectional data, yet research based on panel data finds at most a weak correlation. In this paper, we examine this puzzling pattern by exploring the long‐term evolution of attitudes over the life cycle. We evaluate the predictions of five different explanations on the relationship between attitudes and income experiences. These explanations focus on, respectively: socialization, ant…
Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies
This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups-based on the interaction of these two dichot…
Political science (24 works) · Politics (22 works) · Economics (21 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (20 works) · Law (12 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (11 works) · Public economics (10 works) · Welfare state (10 works) · Market economy (9 works) · Welfare (9 works)