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SummaryThis 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 one's 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.

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;