We examine the relationship between education and social protection policies across OECD countries and thereby contribute to the growing political and academic discussion on how social investment and social protection are interrelated. We focus on how government policy in two policy domains (education, social protection) affects social stratification. The paper is based on a principal methodological innovation, which lies in disaggregating the ways in which policy-makers influence stratification into two distinct dimensions: one is concerned with how much the state intervenes in the provision of education/social protection and how much it leaves to individual, family and market, and the second is concerned with the bias towards equality or stratification found in the state system itself. We find that countries can be grouped into a distinct number of education–social protection typologies, which differ from traditional clusterings and could indicate the need for multi-faceted pan-European education policies that take into account the longstanding differences in stratification as opposed to one-size-fits-all policy initiatives.

This paper discusses how the assumption that individuals and policy makers do not automatically update their prior beliefs with the new information has shaped policy process theories. Rather than the rational

In this Working Document we look at which OECD countries deliberately attempt to reproduce social stratification through educational policies, and which countries put greater emphasis on intervening in the stratification process. First, we examine the relationship between education and welfare policies as measures of intervention in this process: do countries intervene in both education and welfaredriven by a 'stratification culture'? Or is there a trade-off between intervention in education and welfare, with certain countries prioritising one over the other?Our findings indicate that there are two pure types of clusters: i) a cluster in which: "the role of public policy is to promote equality" including countries that are egalitarian in the welfare and the education systems and ii) a cluster with stratification in both, a cluster in which -"there is a proper place for everyone in society" and several mixed clusters. Second, we consider whether it is the state on the one hand or the market or family on the other hand that provides education and welfare.We found that countries can be grouped into more market-oriented and more 'etatist' clusters. Combining the analysis of stratification with the analysis of the market/state boundary, we observe a more complex clustering in groups of less egalitarian and market-oriented countries, less egalitarian market-oriented, egalitarian state-oriented, educational egalitarian state-oriented and educational egalitarian market-oriented countries.We interpret our findings as challenging a one-policy-fits-all approach that advocates education policy reforms designed to increase equal opportunities in education. We argue that the context of each country needs to be considered before the implementation of such policies. * Miroslav Beblavý, Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia and Centre of European Policy Studies (CEPS); Anna-Elisabeth Thum, CEPS; Marcela Veselkova, Slovak Governance Institute, Bratislava, Slovakia. This paper was prepared within the FP7 funded project NEUJOBS www.neujobs.eu. Funding by the European Commission is gratefully acknowledged.CEPS Working Documents are intended to give an indication of work being conducted within CEPS' research programmes and to stimulate reactions from other experts in the field. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent any institution with which they are affiliated.

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In this article we use concentration of electoral support for individual candidates and divergence between party and electorate preferences for candidates to test hypotheses about the party–electorate relationship. We test these using data from preferential voting in Slovak general elections between 1998 and 2010. Our results suggest that low concentration is associated with parties based on ideology and high concentration with parties based on leadership. Age of the party fails to predict the concentration or the divergence. For coalitions, type of coalition matters in regard to divergence. Furthermore, we document that divergence increases with the size of the electoral support, though this seems to be true only for larger parties.