Abstract
AbstractThis article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Employing an experimental vignette study, we uncover complex feedback effects: first, citizens in the study regard a fee level as fair that is close to the actual fee level in the city, suggesting self-reinforcing feedback effects. Second, citizens strongly support a fee structure in which fees vary according to parental income. As this preferred fee structure differs from the local fee structure in the town itself, we interpret the citizens’ preference as evidence for self-undermining policy feedback. Finally, the actual characteristics of the respondents matter less than the fictitious characteristics of the parents in the vignettes, which points to the importance of interpretive rather than resource-based feedback effects. In concluding, we highlight the relevance of these findings for broader debates about policy feedback.
Highlights
This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town
By using vignettes to measure citizens’ fairness perceptions of different fee levels, we provide a new perspective on the study of public opinion on childcare policies and on welfare state policies more generally
Parents pay lower fees if they have more than one child in childcare, but as we focus on fairness perceptions of childcare fees for the first-born child only, we neglect this factor
Summary
This article studies local processes of policy feedback by analysing citizens’ fairness perceptions of public childcare fees in a German town. Citizens strongly support a fee structure in which fees vary according to parental income As this preferred fee structure differs from the local fee structure in the town itself, we interpret the citizens’ preference as evidence for selfundermining policy feedback. Focussing on a particular case allows for a detailed analysis of the different feedback effects at the individual level while holding the macrocontext constant. It concentrates research resources on a single, high-level-quality survey. To foreshadow our main findings: first, we find that citizens consider a level of childcare fees as fair that was slightly below the actual level of fees at that time We interpret this as an indication of a self-reinforcing normative/interpretive policy feedback, as the accepted level of fees is quite close to the actual level. Rather than focussing on which type of policy feedback dominates overall, our analysis suggests that researchers should try to understand better the particular features of the institutional context that may trigger different kinds of feedback dynamics at the individual level
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