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 (1989Castles ( ,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.KEY WORDS Comparative public policy; education spending; OECD countries; pooled time-series analysis. INTRODUCTION!Much ink has been spilled on the analysis of political, institutional, and socioeconomic determinants of social spending (see among many others: Siegel 2002; Huber and Stephens 2001;Kittel and Obinger 2003). In contrast, education policy has been largely neglected by political scientists. Scholars of economics and sociology have looked at education policy much more intensely, discussing issues like educational participation, human capital, or the comparative analysis of education systems (Allmendinger and Aisenbrey 2002;Timmermann 2002) . This is surprising, because the levels of public (and private) education spending vary considerably between member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (see Figure 1). 2Only a comparatively few studies have dealt with the analysis of education spending explicitly and these can be categorized into three groups. First, there are studies that approach the international comparison of education expenditures from the perspective of a single country, so as to better determine the relative position of the country in question (from the perspective of Germany: Farber 2000;

Party politics and education spending: challenging some common wisdom

“…While some authors found that left-wing parties increase education expenditure (Boix 1998;Busemeyer 2007;Castles 1982Castles , 1989Castles , 1998Hega and Hokenmaier 2002;Iversen and Stephens 2008;Potrafke 2011a;Schmidt , 2007, others reported that right-wing parties tend to spend more on education (Ansell 2008(Ansell , 2010Rauh et al 2011). Adding to the confusion, still others even found no party effects and assigned this to the increasing influence of deindustrialization (Jensen 2011).…”

Welfare Regimes and Education Regimes: Equality of Opportunity and Expenditure in the EU (and US)

“…Public education expenditure is related to the level of public social expenditure (Busemeyer, 2007). There is also evidence of a trade-off between state spending for cash-based social welfare programmes and education (Nikolai, 2011).…”

Bildung und die „neue“ Sozialdemokratie: eine Analyse aus der Sicht der vergleichenden Staatsausgabenforschung

“…B. Cameron und Hofferbert (1974), Castles (1982, 1989) und Verner (1979. Seit Kurzem ist das Interesse an Studien zu Bildungsausgaben, auch aufgrund der sich verbessernden Datenlage, stark angestiegen (Schmidt 2002(Schmidt , 2003a(Schmidt , 2004(Schmidt , 2007Busemeyer 2006aBusemeyer , 2006bBusemeyer , 2007aWolf 2006;Nikolai 2007;Zohlnhöfer 2007;Hokenmaier 2002;Hega/ Hokenmaier 2002;Ansell 2006). Die meisten dieser Studien sind y-zentriert, d. h. es geht vor allem um die Identifizierung der statistischen Determinanten der Bildungsausgaben, unter denen die parteipolitische Zusammensetzung der Regierung nur einer von mehreren Faktoren ist.…”

“…9 Zu Erklärung von Ausgabenunterschieden in der Querschnittsdimension können Parteieneffekte jedoch auch in dieser Periode beitragen (vgl. Schmidt 2007;Busemeyer 2006Busemeyer , 2007a 1980-2002 1980-1992 1993-2002 1993-2002 1980-2002 1993-2002 1980-2002 1980-2002 (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) Education-at-a-Glance-Datenreihe (OECD 2006) verfügbar. Ein Nachzeichnen sich verän-dernder Prioritäten bei den Hochschulausgaben durch den Vergleich von Sub-Perioden ist daher schwer möglich.…”