Testing the Retrenchment Hypothesis: Educational Spending, 1960–2002

Schmidt, Manfred G.

doi:10.4337/9781847205292.00012

Cited by 30 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…We show four different model specifications regressing total public education spending on the cabinet seat-shares of social democratic parties. We focus on social democrats because earlier studies argued and found that they are more obliged to education (Ansell 2008(Ansell , 2010Busemeyer 2006Busemeyer , 2009Iversen and Stephens 2008;Schmidt 2007) and emphasize education more in their manifestos (Ansell 2010;Busemeyer et al 2013). Nonetheless the results are robust when we include other party families' seat-shares or broader left -right categories.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 64%

“…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).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…5 Unfortunately, as has been discussed by many others (Ansell 2008(Ansell , 2010Busemeyer 2009Busemeyer , 2014Heidenheimer 1996;Jensen 2011;Schmidt 2007), data allowing for differentiation between education sectors are unavailable for more countries or a longer time frame. As pointed out above, the distinction between different sectors is crucial, however, because very different (re-)distributive dynamics are at work.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, these scholars proposed using party families as a more finegrained differentiation than left -right dichotomies (Ansell 2010;Busemeyer 2006Busemeyer , 2007Busemeyer , 2009Jensen 2011;Potrafke 2011b;Schmidt , 2007Wolf and Zohlnhöfer 2009). Empirical studies underlined this, claiming that parties within the broader left -right camps indeed behave differently.…”

Section: Party Influence On Education Spending: From Left -Right Dichmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Empirical studies underlined this, claiming that parties within the broader left -right camps indeed behave differently. For example, liberals and Christian democrats were argued to increase education spending (at least in times of economic prosperity [Busemeyer 2006]), whereas conservative parties are potentially negatively associated with education spending (Busemeyer 2006;Schmidt 2007). Moreover, differentiating between spending on different education sectors, social democrats were argued to increasingly focus on tertiary education, while conservative and Christian democratic government participation is negatively associated with public tertiary education spending (Boix 1998;Busemeyer 2006Busemeyer , 2009.…”

Section: Party Influence On Education Spending: From Left -Right Dichmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Party politics and education spending: challenging some common wisdom

Garritzmann¹,

Seng²

2015

Journal of European Public Policy

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Much literature has analysed parties' influence on public education spending. We challenge this literature on theoretical, methodological and empirical grounds. It is standard to regress expenditure on cabinet seat share weighted party family dummies in time series cross section regressions using 'country year' data. But using 'country year' data artificially inflates the number of cases and leads to biased estimates, as governments usually do not change annually. Second, using party families as proxies for party preferences assumes that parties within families hold similar positions while they differ across families. But this is empirically often not the case. Finally, a historical institutionalist perspective suggests that we should not expect party effects anymore in the first place. Empirically, we propose a new design, using direct measures of party preferences in analyses on govern ment term level. We find that the partisan composition of government did not have any significant effects on education spending from 1995 to 2010 in 21 democ racies.

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