Social Democrats and the New Partisan Politics of Public Investment in Education
Journal of European Public Policy, Forthcoming
48 Pages Posted: 29 Aug 2008
Date Written: August 1, 2008
Abstract
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 enrollment) and, at the same time, new middle class constituencies to escape electoral dilemmas and re-forge the cross-class alliance with the middle class.
Keywords: human capital, public spending, partisan theory, OECD countries
JEL Classification: H52, I22
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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