Marius R. Busemeyer

Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing : the rival pressures from age and income in 14 OECD countries

This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state preferences. In particular for the case of education spending, but also for other policy areas, we see that ones position in the life cycle is a more important predictor of preferences than income. Second, some countries, such as the United States, show a higher salience of the age cleavage across all policy fields; that is, age is a more important line of political preference formation in these countries than in others. Third, country characteristics matter. Although the relative salience of age varies across policy areas, we see — within one policy area — a large variance across countries.

Determinants of public education spending in 21 OECD democracies, 1980-2001

Abstract This paper focuses on the analysis of determinants of public education spending in OECD countries. It starts out by reviewing and replicating the model presented by Castles (1989, 1998), finding that only a few of his explanatory variables remain significant in a pooled time-series framework. I present an alternative model that contains socio-economic, political, and institutional variables: the level of economic development, the magnitude of demographic demand, the constitutional veto structure, the level of public social expenditures, the degree of tax-revenue decentralization as well as government participation of conservative parties.

Social Democrats and the New Partisan Politics of Public Investment in Education

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.

Review Article: Comparative Political Science and the Study of Education

The study of education has long been a neglected subject in political science. Recently, however, scholarly interest in the field has been increasing rapidly. This review essay introduces the general readership to this burgeoning literature with a particular focus on work in comparative public policy and political economy. Particular topics discussed are the historical and political foundations of contemporary education systems, the political and institutional determinants of education policies, the internationalization and Europeanization of education, the political economy of skill formation in varieties of capitalism and the effects of education policies. The article also introduces scholarship in related disciplines such as economics, sociology and comparative education sciences, and points out avenues for future interdisciplinary dialogue between political science and these disciplines.

Fiscal austerity and the trade-off between public investment and social spending

This article makes two claims: first, it argues that the impact of fiscal austerity varies across different types of public spending. In particular, we show that discretionary spending (public investment) is hit harder by fiscal austerity than entitlement spending (public spending on pensions and unemployment) because of different institutional and political constraints. Second, we find that electoral institutions affect how governments solve this trade-off. Discretionary spending is cut back more severely in countries with an electoral system based on proportional representation than in a majoritarian system. Our empirical analysis relies on a methodological approach (composite data analysis) that takes into account interdependencies between budgetary categories. Using data for 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1979 to 2003, we find strong evidence for the varying impact of fiscal stress on the budget shares of discretionary and entitlement spending as well as strong interactive effect between fiscal austerity and electoral institutions.

Inequality and the political economy of education: An analysis of individual preferences in OECD countries:

Scholarly interest in the study of education from the perspective of political science has increased rapidly in the last few years. However, the literature focuses on comparing education politics at the country level, neglecting the analysis of micro-level foundations of education policies in terms of individual preferences and their interaction with macro contexts. This paper provides a first step in addressing this research gap, engaging in a multilevel analysis of survey data for a large number of OECD countries. The core research question is how institutional contexts – in this case socio-economic and educational inequalities – shape the micro-level association between the individual income position and support for education spending. The core finding is that these different dimensions of inequality have different implications at the micro level. Higher levels of socio-economic inequality enhance the conflict between the rich and the poor over public investments in education. By contrast, when access to higher levels of education is effectively restricted, the rich are more likely to support public education spending. This is because higher levels of educational stratification ensure that further public investments in education benefit the rich relatively more than the poor, who in turn become less willing to support this kind of public spending.

Who Owns Education? Cleavage Structures in the Partisan Competition over Educational Expansion

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over the topic of educational expansion, relying on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. It identifies political parties as ‘issue-owners’ and ‘issue-ignorers’, respectively, and finds considerable variation with regard to cleavage structures of party competition between countries and across time. One tentative conclusion from the analysis is that policy legacies play an important role in shaping cleavage structures.

Individual policy preferences for vocational versus academic education: Microlevel evidence for the case of Switzerland

This paper uses an original dataset from a survey conducted in Switzerland in 2007 to explore the dynamics of education policy preferences. This issue has largely been neglected in that most studies on welfare state attitudes do not look at preferences for education. We argue that education policy preferences vary along two dimensions: the distribution of resources across different sectors of the education system (that is, vocational training versus academic education) and the level of investment in education both from public and private sources. With regard to the former, the findings suggest that individual educational experience matters most, that is, individuals prefer to concentrate resources on those educational sectors that are closest to their own educational background. With regard to the latter, we find that affiliation to partisan ideologies matters much more than other variables. Proponents of the left demand more investment both from the state as well as from the private sector and oppose individual tuition fees.

Pension Reform in Germany and Austria: System Change vs. Quantitative Retrenchment

This article first outlines the differences in outcome of pension reform in Germany and Austria. The 2001 German pension reform cut benefits very little, but it started a system changing transformation process by strengthening the second (occupational pensions) and third pillar (private pensions). The 2003 Austrian pension reform, pushed through against major opposition from the labour unions, contains very few elements of policy innovation, but benefits have been cut back much more significantly than in the German case. The paper explains the difference in outcomes (system change in Germany, retrenchment in Austria) by looking at the structure of political institutions. The federal government in Austria is much less constrained by formal veto players than the German government, which had to engage in extensive coalition-building to get the pension bill through the second chamber of parliament. Therefore the influence of informal veto players (mainly unions) was much higher in Germany. The impact on the reform outcome was the positive discrimination of occupational pensions and less severe cuts in the benefit levels. The concluding thesis is that for successful and long-term sustainable welfare state reform, a small number of formal veto players is a valuable resource. A large number of formal veto players is an obstacle to retrenchment reforms, although it might encourage policy innovation, because political actors will look for other policy venues to increase their leverage.

Partisan power, economic coordination and variations in vocational training systems in Europe

This article explores the variation of vocational education and training systems in European countries. From a survey of experts in 15 European countries, we develop a typology along two dimensions: employer involvement and public commitment. In a second step, we explain the variety of skill formation systems, highlighting the importance of partisan power and economic coordination. The causal argument is applied in three illustrative case studies of Germany, Sweden and the UK. In particular, we argue that a high degree of economic coordination increases the relevance of training relative to academic education. However, differences within the cluster of coordinated market economies are related to different legacies of partisan power in the post-war decades.