Sector preferences in job choice have rarely been tested empirically across different administrative systems. We address this gap and apply a between-subject experimental design to examine the attractiveness of public, private, and nonprofit employers in two countries in different administrative traditions. Respondents (n = 362) from an Anglo-Saxon (i.e., the U.S.) and continental European country (i.e., Germany) were exposed to job advertisements that only differed in the employer’s sector affiliation, with other job attributes, such as payment and working hours, held constant. Contrary to expectations, and consistently across the two country samples, respondents evaluated public sector jobs more positively compared to vacancies in the private sector. In contrast, we found no such comparative advantage of public over nonprofit employers. By providing counterevidence to the prevalence of negative attitudes toward public organizations, our study warns against overgeneralizing previous findings on negativity biases to the context of employer attractiveness.

工作选择中的部门偏好很少在不同的行政系统中进行实证检验。我们解决了这一差距，并应用了跨学科实验设计来检验两个具有不同行政传统的国家的公共、私人和非营利雇主的吸引力。受访者（n = 362) 来自盎格鲁-撒克逊（即美国）和欧洲大陆国家（即德国）的招聘广告仅在雇主的部门隶属关系上有所不同，而其他工作属性（例如工资和工作时间）则被保留持续的。与预期相反，在两个国家样本中，受访者对公共部门职位的评价比私营部门的职位空缺更为积极。相比之下，我们没有发现公众对非营利雇主的这种比较优势。通过对普遍存在的对公共组织的消极态度提供反证，我们的研究警告不要将先前关于消极偏见的发现过度概括为雇主吸引力的背景。