Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) policies are a widespread tool for increasing the representativeness of the public workforce by providing applicants from marginalized groups with an advantage in the application process. Critics of those policies argue that these weaken the merit principle in public hiring, emphasizing that only the qualification of an applicant should be decisive in the application process. The scope of this paper is twofold: First, we address the question who is likely to support EEO policies. Second, we analyze the conditions under which a trade-off between EEO policies and the merit-hiring principle are perceived. We conduct a survey and an survey experiment on a sample of more than 800 citizens as well as a sample of more than 400 students of public administration. The findings show that, respondents with high PSM and left-leaning respondents favor active EEO policies, while right-leaning individuals tend to oppose EEO policies. Future bureaucrats do not differ in their preferences for EEO policies from civic respondents. We further find, that neither PSM nor public sector work moderate the generally observable perception of a trade-off between the merit-principle and EEO policies, but right-leaning ndividuals overemphasize the importance of merit-based recruitment, when a potential tension with migrant representation in mentioned.
