Journal
JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN PUBLIC POLICY
Volume 16, Issue 1, Pages 107-126Publisher
ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/13501760802453171
Keywords
Education; higher education; OECD countries; pooled time-series analysis; public spending; social democratic parties
Categories
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper studies the impact on public education spending of social democratic participation in government. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of spending in OECD democracies, it is shown that social democrats have increased public spending primarily on higher education. This finding is at odds with simple class-based models of partisan preferences (Boix) that predict a preference for non-tertiary education. As an alternative, the notion of a 'new politics of public investment in education' (Iversen) is presented. From this perspective, political parties are not merely transmission belts for the economic interests of social classes, but use policies and spending strategically to attract and consolidate voter groups. By increasing public investment in tertiary education, social democrats cater to their core electoral constituencies (for example, by expanding enrolment) and, at the same time, new middle-class constituencies to escape electoral dilemmas and reforge the cross-class alliance with the middle class.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available