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Education policy is a salient topic both in political debates and in the scholarly literature. Still, the study of individual policy preferences on education policy has received little scholarly attention, mostly because existing comparative surveys provide only very crude measures on education policy. To address this research gap, we conducted a representative survey of public opinion on the details of education policy in eight Western European countries. This article, first, presents analyses of these data, focusing on people's preferences for public expenditure on education relative to other social policies as well as its distribution across different education sectors (early childhood and pre-primary education, general schools, vocational education and training, and higher education). In contrast to existing surveys, our survey forces citizens to prioritize between different policy areas and education sectors. We investigate determinants of individual preferences, focusing particularly on self-interest, ideological norms and institutional feedback effects. We find that individual educational background, partisan ideology and having children are significantly associated with variation in preferences. Furthermore, we find tentative evidence for self-undermining institutional feedback effects.

"Around the turn of the 21st century, new social policies started to develop all around the world. Bolsa Familia in Brazil, Progresa in Mexico, Superémonos in Costa Rica, Juntos in Peru... almost all Latin American countries have developed "conditional cash transfers" (CCTs), a new type of social policy usually conditioning benefits for poor families on their children going to school or attending health checkups. At the same time, some old industrialized countries famously known for being the heaven of the male breadwinner model have introduced surprising innovation in their welfare systems: in Germany massive investment in preschool childcare (Kita) since the early 2000s and the introduction of two "daddy months" in a German parental leave scheme in 2007; in Japan a well-paid parental leave in 2014 and universalization of free preschool education for ages 3-5 in 2017; in South Korea childcare facilities for children below the age of five made free of charge in 2013. Policies aimed at investing in children's care and education and in mothers' labor market participation seem to have bloomed almost everywhere. Worldwide there has been a sharp increase in access to secondary and tertiary education. Youth training programs have spread in many Latin American countries, while European countries have introduced youth guarantees, an innovative inclusive policy for their NEETs (young people not in education, employment, or training)"--

"Around the turn of the 21st century, new social policies started to develop all around the world. Bolsa Familia in Brazil, Progresa in Mexico, Superémonos in Costa Rica, Juntos in Peru... almost all Latin American countries have developed "conditional cash transfers" (CCTs), a new type of social policy usually conditioning benefits for poor families on their children going to school or attending health checkups. At the same time, some old industrialized countries famously known for being the heaven of the male breadwinner model have introduced surprising innovation in their welfare systems: in Germany massive investment in preschool childcare (Kita) since the early 2000s and the introduction of two "daddy months" in a German parental leave scheme in 2007; in Japan a well-paid parental leave in 2014 and universalization of free preschool education for ages 3-5 in 2017; in South Korea childcare facilities for children below the age of five made free of charge in 2013. Policies aimed at investing in children's care and education and in mothers' labor market participation seem to have bloomed almost everywhere. Worldwide there has been a sharp increase in access to secondary and tertiary education. Youth training programs have spread in many Latin American countries, while European countries have introduced youth guarantees, an innovative inclusive policy for their NEETs (young people not in education, employment, or training)."

AbstractAs countries transition from industrial to post‐industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy‐makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to different degrees and in highly different forms. Our goal is twofold: First, we introduce a new typology of social investment policies, distinguishing nine types along two dimensions: three distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified, targeted) and three functions (skill creation, preservation, mobilization). This differentiation allows fine‐grained analyses of the causes and consequences of different kinds of social investments, thus offering a perspective to study the relationship between efficiency and inclusiveness in a way that goes beyond the mere discussion how social investment policies grosso modo affect inequalities ('equalizing' versus 'Matthew Effects'). Second, we theorize on the politics of social investment. We argue that the interaction of policy legacies and socioeconomic factors is the main explanation for which functions of social investment policies are introduced, whereas their distributive profiles are crucially shaped by political coalitions. We illustrate with empirical material from democracies around the globe.

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both "methodological nationalism" and "methodological subnationalism" should be avoided. We argue instead that in multilevel systems national and subnational governments jointly affect policy-making. Their respective influence is, however, conditional on the distribution of policy authority. Moreover, we identify power asymmetries, as subnational governments hardly affect policy-making in centralized systems whereas national governments shape subnational policy-making even in decentralized polities. Empirically, we study the case of education policy. Novel data on regional education spending, regional and national governments' ideology, and regional authority over education in 282 regions in 15 countries over 21 years reveals strong support for the interplay between ideology and the distribution of authority across levels. We conclude by sketching a resulting research agenda.

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both "methodological nationalism" and "methodological subnationalism" should be avoided. We argue instead that in multilevel systems national and subnational governments jointly affect policy-making. Their respective influence is, however, conditional on the distribution of policy authority. Moreover, we identify power asymmetries, as subnational governments hardly affect policy-making in centralized systems whereas national governments shape subnational policy-making even in decentralized polities. Empirically, we study the case of education policy. Novel data on regional education spending, regional and national governments' ideology, and regional authority over education in 282 regions in 15 countries over 21 years reveals strong support for the interplay between ideology and the distribution of authority across levels. We conclude by sketching a resulting research agenda.

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both methodological nationalism and methodological subnationalism should be avoided. We argue instead that in multilevel systems national and subnational governments jointly affect policy-making. Their respective influence is, however, conditional on the distribution of policy authority. Moreover, we identify power asymmetries, as subnational governments hardly affect policy-making in centralized systems whereas national governments shape subnational policy-making even in decentralized polities. Empirically, we study the case of education policy. Novel data on regional education spending, regional and national governments' ideology, and regional authority over education in 282 regions in 15 countries over 21 years reveals strong support for the interplay between ideology and the distribution of authority across levels. We conclude by sketching a resulting research agenda.

This article revisits the influential partisan alignment hypothesis, which posits that subnational governments aligned with central governments exhibit higher expenditures. To promote their own and their party's re-election chances, central government politicians allocate more resources to ideologically aligned co-partisans at the subnational level. Consequently, aligned subnational governments exhibit higher expenditures than non-aligned ones. This article examines alignment effects in subnational education spending. Education is a crucial test case because, unlike other expenditures, the allocation of education spending is discretionary and often does not follow precise formulas. Using a novel dataset covering 266 subnational regions in 14 countries over 20 years, we offer the first cross-country analysis of alignment effects. Controlling for rival explanations, the findings reveal alignment effects on subnational education expenditures. Furthermore, political institutions matter, as alignment effects are stronger in countries where subnational governments have more discretion over education policy while lacking their own revenue sources (vertical fiscal imbalance). These findings imply that decentralisation might increase educational and socio-economic inequalities.

This path-breaking addition to the Comparative Politics of Education series studies the influence of public opinion on the contemporary politics of education reform in Western Europe. The authors analyze new data from a survey of public opinion on education policy across eight countries, and they also provide detailed case studies of reform processes based on interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders. The book's core finding is that public opinion has the greatest influence in a world of 'loud' politics, when salience is high and attitudes are coherent. In contrast, when issues are salient but attitudes are conflicting, the signal of public opinion turns 'loud, but noisy' and party politics have a stronger influence on policy-making. In the case of 'quiet' politics, when issue salience is low, interest groups are dominant. This book is required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of policy-makers' selective responsiveness to public demands and concerns.

AbstractThe traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post‐industrial knowledge economies. Experts and policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a 'social investment' model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what conditions are citizens willing to accept such future‐oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hitherto neglected role of citizens' trust in and satisfaction with government. Trust and satisfaction matter because future‐oriented reforms generate uncertainties, risks and costs, which trust and government satisfaction can attenuate. We offer micro‐level causal evidence using experiments in a representative survey covering eight European countries and confirm these findings with European Social Survey data for 22 countries. We find that trust and government satisfaction increase reform support and moderate the effects of self‐interest and ideological standpoints. These findings have crucial implications not least because they help explain why some countries manage – but others fail – to enact important reforms.

Published: 23 March 2018 ; The concept of the social investment welfare state has received a lot of attention and support both from academics and policymakers. It is therefore commonly assumed that policies such as investing in education or family services would also receive significant support from the mass public. While there are some indications of this, existing comparative surveys of public opinion usually do not take into account how citizens perceive and react to policy trade-offs, i.e. how they respond when forced to prioritize between different types of social policies, which is more realistic given budget constraints. This article presents original data from a representative survey of public opinion in eight Western European countries, studying how support for social investment policies changes when additional spending on these policies would have to be financed with cutbacks in other parts of the welfare state. The central findings are that citizens generally dislike being forced to cut back one type of social spending to expand another, but there is a significant degree of variation across individuals and policy fields. Material self-interest and ideological predispositions as well as their interaction help understanding differences in the acceptance of these trade-offs. The findings have important implications for the political viability of social investment policies. Political parties aiming to expand social investment in a context of fiscal austerity are confronted with different and distinct electoral constraints and challenges given the respective preferences of their electorates.