Partisanship, Inequality and the Composition of Public Spending on Education
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00963.x |
| Author | Dulce Manzano |
| Date | 01 June 2013 |
| Published date | 01 June 2013 |
| Subject Matter | Original Article |
Partisanship, Inequality and the Composition of
Public Spending on Educationpost_963422..441
Dulce Manzano
Complutense University of Madrid
This article explores the determinants of the configuration of public educational expenditure. Recent contributions
to the political economy debate about public education have rightly emphasised that the redistributive
consequences of state intervention may vary across levels of education. But they focused mainly on the explanat-
ory role of government partisanship in understanding spending at different levels of education. In this ar ticle, I
propose a more comprehensive political economy account by considering the interaction of the ideological
preferences and electoral motives of governments to explain variation in the allocation of educational budget.
Through a time-series cross-sectional analysis of several developed industrial democracies observed in recent
decades, the article demonstrates that the ideological orientation of governments and the position of the median
voter do influence decisions regarding the distribution of public educational resources between different schooling
levels.While r ight-wing parties prefer to concentrate resources on university, they appear to respond to an eco-
nomic downturn of the median voter by reducing in a more significant way relative spending on tertiary
education.
Keywords: education policy; redistribution; partisanship; inequality
In the fragmented literature on the determinants of public educational expenditure in
democracies, there are a number of studies placing the redistributive implications of
this policy at the core of their arguments (Ansell, 2006; Boix, 1997; 1998; Perotti, 1993;
Saint-Paul and Verdier, 1993).1The earlier generation of analyses generally maintained
the view that public investment in education constitutes a progressive redistribution
measure.2Whether formalised as a universal public good or simply conceived as an
egalitarian policy, state provision of education was thought to benefit members of
the lower classes at the expense of the most privileged sectors of society who tend to
bear a disproportionately larger fiscal burden. In line with more recent studies on higher
education spending (Ansell, 2008; Iversen and Stephens, 2008), this article questions
the conventional view and claims that the redistributive implications of public interven-
tion may change at higher levels of education. The key assumption of the article is that
an increase in government expenditure on pre-tertiary education produces a greater
degree of redistribution in favour of lower social classes than the same increase at uni-
versity level.3Thus I argue that socio-economic groups are likely to have competing
preferences over the expenditure effort in tertiary relative to that in lower levels of
education.
The majority of the political economy studies about state expenditure in a particular
sector of the educational system take as their dependent variable the level of public
spending in that sector, say tertiar y, as a percentage of national wealth. A crucial flaw of
these works is that they do not distinguish the two government decisions implied by
such a dependent variable. We can consider, at least analytically, that the differences we
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doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2012.00963.x
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013 VOL 61, 422–441
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
observe regarding the amount of public resources spent at a particular level of education
(as a percentage of GDP) are the product of a decision over the size of state intervention
in education (or in the economy at large), shaping the quantity of revenue dedicated to
this policy area, and over the alternative uses of fiscal proceeds. Both dimensions of
public policy are likely to be disputed among opposing social interests and political
parties. Thus it is necessary to understand what determines these two aspects of edu-
cation policy in order to answer the question of why some governments dedicate more
resources, for instance, in tertiary education than others do. This article focuses on the
preferences of governments over the allocation of a given amount of revenue among the
several stages concerned with organising the educational system.
A second contribution of the article concerns the account it offer s about the formation of
political preferences. In addition to exploring the impact of partisan ideology, which
constitutes the central goal of contemporary research such as Ansell (2008), Busemeyer
(2007; 2009) or Iversen and Stephens (2008), the article brings the role of electoral
constraints (i.e., the policy ideal of the median voter) to the fore in understanding the
political economy mechanisms behind rulers’ preferences over the allocation of the educa-
tional budget. Specifically, it is hypothesised that governments dominated by left-wing
parties and confronted with a poorer median voter are associated with spending combina-
tions that increasingly favour basic schooling over tertiary education. Moreover, the theo-
retical argument suggests that the effect of partisanship is conditional on the level of
economic inequality in the society.
Using a panel of developed industrial democracies observed over several years in
recent decades, a set of time-series cross-sectional regressions is estimated to test empiri-
cally the working hypotheses. Broadly speaking, the empirical findings are fairly consis-
tent with the theoretical priors. Taking the ratio of tertiary spending to primary
expenditure as an indicator of the relative weight conferred to each level of education in
each government’s educational financial plans, it is shown that partisanship and income
inequality – the indicator for the economic position of the median voter – systematically
and significantly shape the distribution of the education budget in the expected
direction. The estimation of an interactive model offers support to the hypothesis
according to which Cabinets further to the right, although they are more likely
to enhance tertiary education than leftist governments, respond to a reduction in the
decisive voter’s revenue (or to an increase in inequality) with major decreases in the
spending ratio of interest – that is, the relative importance of university vis-à-vis primary
schooling.
The article is organised as follows. The next section analyses the contributions of the
relevant academic work most related to this article and presents the theoretical arguments
and the derived hypotheses. The third section tests the predictions on data for nineteen
Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries observed
during the 1980s until the mid-2000s. After describing the measures and data for the
dependent variable and the more substantive covariates, I present the statistical results
regarding the relative spending on tertiary education. The final section presents a summary
of the main findings and a discussion of their implications for the broader welfare state
literature.
PUBLIC SPENDING ON EDUCATION 423
© 2012The Author.Political Studies © 2012 Political Studies Association
POLITICAL STUDIES: 2013, 61(2)
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