Publication

This paper presents evidence of cycling mechanisms in teacher employment decisions in Germany. According to the authors, strong institutional constraints and better-informed voters may lead incumbents seeking re-election to shift the use of cycle mechanisms to those policy domains that are most easily manipulable, targetable and timeable. They find that German state-level incumbents reverse their election-period increases in new teacher hiring during politically safer points in the electoral cycle, while more heavily indebted states reduce the size of their teacher pool. They also point out that a higher political salience of education strengthens the manipulation of teacher hiring for electoral purposes.