Julian L. Garritzmann

• Professor
• Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt

This book analyzes the political economy of higher education finance across a range of OECD countries, exploring why some students pay extortionate tuition fees whilst for others their education is free. What are the redistributional consequences of these different tuition-subsidy systems? Analysing the variety of existing systems, Garritzmann show...

This paper is the background paper for the collaborative research project "the World Politics of Social Investment (WoPSI)". The WoPSI project is aimed at studying the politics of social investment across the democratic world from a comparative perspective. The guiding research questions are descriptive as well as causal: How do social investment a...

The literature on the partisan foundations of education policies leads to ambiguous expectations with regard to the predominant cleavage structures in party competition on this topic. There is disagreement as to whether leftist or rightist parties are responsible for increasing spending on education, while others claim that educational expansion ha...

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 a...

This article provides a detailed analysis of individual preferences towards public financial aid to students from low-income families. Who favours/opposes such aid? What are the determinants of the respective preferences? I argue that three sets of factors jointly shape these preferences: materialistic self-interests, political attitudes, and the s...

Culture is neglected or downplayed in the political economy and public policy literature in general and the politics of education literature in particular. An important recent book by Cathie Jo Martin – Education for All? Literature, Culture, and Education Development in Britain and Denmark – sets out to change this by studying the role of fiction...

Social investment has become a buzzword among social policy-makers and welfare state scholars alike. Social investments seem to be the natural social policy response to the emergence of the skill-focused knowledge economy. Proponents advocate social investment as simultaneously addressing social and economic goals. At the same time, the social inve...

Important reforms are necessary to adjust today's welfare states to the challenges of post-industrial knowledge economies. Public opinion, however, is often skeptical towards large-scale reforms, especially when the benefits will accrue only in the future. We analyze the conditions that affect citizens' support for such reforms on the basis of orig...

Policy‐making is a complex business. While scholars have studied the politics of policy‐making for decades, we know surprisingly little about the role of individual ministries . We argue that and why individual ministries crucially shape policies' content, particularly their distributive profiles. We explain that it matters whether for example, a M...

Liberalization is a perennial topic in politics and political science. We first review a broad scholarly debate, showing that the mainstream theories make rival and contradictory claims regarding the role of political parties in (de)liberalization reforms. We then develop a framework of conditional partisan influence, arguing that and under what co...

Über Kapitalismus lässt sich im Singular und im Plural nachdenken. Dieser Band wählt den zweiten Weg und vertritt die These, dass es den Kapitalismus nicht gibt, sondern vielmehr zahlreiche Kapitalismustypen: »Koordinierten« Kapitalismus (in Deutschland und Kontinentaleuropa), »Liberalen« (in Nordamerika), »Abhängigen« (in Osteuropa), »Konglomerat-...

This chapter provides an overview on higher education (HE) funding in (Western) Europe – and the advanced democracies more generally. The first part of the chapter develops a typology of HE funding and offers a systematic descriptive overview on HE funding in the advanced OECD economies, paying particular attention to Europe. Comparative data is an...

Many scholars and observers have assumed that globalization triggers convergence in many areas, including education policy and systems. Yet, while some change has happened, the central elements of countries' education systems have been relatively unaffected by globalization. This chapter explains this inertia, pointing at the politics of education....

As countries transition from industrial to post‐industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy‐makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to differen...

Which political factors support or inhibit the development of social investment policies across different world regions? Answering this question is the goal of this volume and its simultaneously published sister volume. This theory chapter makes three contributions: a) it situates the motivation and ambition of the two-volume project in the existin...

This concluding chapter summarizes what the authors have learned from the global comparison of welfare reform strategies in general and social investment strategies in particular. Drawing on all chapters of both volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment Project, it first offers a typology of how to differentiate, characterize, and systemat...

This chapter traces the development of regional varieties of knowledge economies over the past two centuries from a global perspective. First, it shows massive educational expansion across all world regions, with a specific shift toward tertiary education and cognitive skills in the most advanced capitalist democracies. Second, focusing on the latt...

This introductory chapter presents the main objectives and contributions of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which are to both map and explain the diversity of social investment policies adopted around the democratic world. The chapter starts with a review of the literature on social investment policies, pointing at several...

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive va...

Social investment reform strategies vary across countries with regard to the politicization of policy proposals, the key functions of social investment reforms, and their distributive profiles. Since most of the key drivers of variation cluster by regional context, this chapter explores the context of social investment politics across countries in...

This chapter develops a theoretical model for the conditions under which parties, public opinion, or interest groups, respectively, affect public policymaking. It argues that the influence of public opinion, parties, and interest groups depends on the salience of the respective topic and on the degree of agreement in public opinion. Public opinion...

The chapter maps the development of welfare state reforms in Western Europe and Northern America, central and eastern Europe, North East Asia, and Latin America. It identifies specific trends such as the focus on demographics in Asia, new instruments to fight poverty in Latin America, a novel human capital perspective in the Baltic region, the focu...

Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policymakers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive va...

This is the comprehensively revised second edition of a volume that was welcomed at its first appearance as ‘the most authoritative survey and critique of the welfare state yet published’. Of its fifty-one chapters, some chapters are brand new; all have been systematically revised, and they are all right up to date. The first seven sections of the...

Bildung ist laut Grundgesetz Ländersache – in kaum einem anderen Politikfeld können die Länder ähnlich viel gestalten. Bildungspolitik ist damit ein zentrales – wenn nicht das zentralste – Thema von Landespolitik. Dieses Kapitel analysiert die Bildungspolitik der grün-schwarzen Regierung in Baden-Württemberg (2016–2021). Im ersten Teil vergleichen...

The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's postindustrial knowledge economies. Experts and policymakers have therefore called for welfare state readjustment towards a “social investment” model (focusing on human skills and capabilities). Under what condi...

This chapter reviews the paradigm and spread of social investment policies, and discusses them as key elements of the “knowledge economy welfare state”. Social investments are policies that aim at creating, preserving, and mobilizing human skills and capabilities. The chapter discusses the emergence of social investment as a new social policy parad...

Comparative analyses of public opinion on education policy in developed countries. Although research has suggested a variety of changes to education policy that have the potential to improve educational outcomes, politicians are often reluctant to implement such evidence-based reforms. Public opinion and pressure by interest groups would seem to ha...

This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally mor...

Policy-making in Multi-Level Systems: Ideology, Authority, and Education. Online Appendix III: Regional Level Governments Database

We offer brief but detailed profiles of regions' authority over education policy from 1990 until 2010. As we are mainly interested in education spending, our codings focus on authority over education funding; it might equally hold for other aspects of education policy (e.g., teaching contents, teaching methods, teacher hiring-and-firing procedures,...

Most political systems consist of multiple layers. While this fact is widely acknowledged, we know surprisingly little about its implications for policy-making. Most comparative studies still focus exclusively on the national level. We posit that both 'methodological nationalism' and 'methodological subnationalism' should be avoided. We argue inste...

Welfare is the largest expenditure category in all advanced democracies. Consequently, much literature has studied partisan effects on total and policy‐specific welfare expenditure. Yet, these results cannot be trusted: The methodological standard is to apply time‐series cross‐section‐regressions to annual observation data. But governments hardly c...

The debate on effects of globalisation on welfare states is extensive. Often couched in terms of a battle between the compensation and the efficiency theses, the scholarly literature has provided contradictory arguments and findings. This article contributes to the scholarly debate by exploring in greater detail the micro-level foundations of compe...

Rezension im Erscheinen in der Politischen Vierteljahresschrift (PVS) zu "Iversen, Torben, und David Soskice (2019) Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism through a Turbulent Century. Princeton and Woodstock, Princeton University Press. 360 Seiten. $29,95."

Social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro level. We expand this perspective by studying public opinion towards social investment compared to other welfare policies, exploiting new public opinion data from eight Euro...

In all advanced democracies, policies related to the welfare state are the largest part of public policy activity. Cross-pressured by globalization, deindustrialization, rising public debts, demographic changes, permanent austerity and the rise of 'new social risks', welfare states in post-industrial democracies have entered a new phase of consolid...

The concept of the social investment welfare state has received a lot of attention and support both from academics and policymakers. It is therefore commonly assumed that policies such as investing in education or family services would also receive significant support from the mass public. While there are some indications of this, existing comparat...

Spätestens seit dem Wandel der westlichen Demokratien von Industrie- zu Wissensgesellschaften sind Bildung und Bildungspolitik zentrale Themen der vergleichenden Sozialstaatsforschung geworden. Dieses Kapitel bietet einen Überblick über die politikwissenschaftliche, historisch-vergleichende Literatur zu Bildungspolitik und diskutiert das komplexe Z...

Education policy is a salient topic both in political debates and in the scholarly literature. Still, the study of individual policy preferences on education policy has received little scholarly attention, mostly because existing comparative surveys provide only very crude measures on education policy. To address this research gap, we conducted a r...

This article revisits the influential partisan alignment hypothesis, which posits that subnational governments aligned with central governments exhibit higher expenditures. To promote their own and their party’s re-election chances, central government politicians are believed to allocate more resources to their co-partisans at the subnational level...

Public opinion research has found that increasing the investment in education is generally very popular among citizens in Western Europe. However, this evidence from publicly available opinion surveys may be misleading, because these surveys do not force respondents to prioritize between different parts of the education system or between education...

The Partisan Politics of Higher Education - Volume 50 Issue 2 - Julian L. Garritzmann

In the wake of the ‘Great Recession’, welfare states have entered a new phase of austerity. Simultaneously, new social risks and the rise of the knowledge economy fuel new demands on the welfare state. We analyse how demands for social investment policies – particularly education – come into conflict with budgetary concerns, using new survey data o...

The “World Politics of Social Investment” (WoPSI) project aims at explaining variance in social investment agendas and social in-vestment reforms across democratic countries in different regions of the World. Virtually all capitalist economies grapple with challenges of demographic change, slow economic growth, poor employment performance and incre...

A political system cannot be imagined without opposition. Despite this crucial position in politics, political science has largely neglected to study oppositions. Attempting to fill this gap, this article analyses the institutional opportunities of parliamentary oppositions. It offers a parsimonious framework by distinguishing two dimensions of opp...

The debate on effects of economic globalization on welfare states is extensive. A prominent hypothesis is that generous welfare policies buffer the negative externalities of globalization, but recent empirical evidence confirms a negative association between globalization and public social spending. Attempting to reconcile these conflicting finding...

This chapter provides a comparative overview of the higher education tuition-subsidy systems of 33 advanced democracies over time. Reviewing the existing literature, I first show that a systematic comparative overview of the interrelationship of tuition systems and subsidy systems is still lacking but highly needed in the literature. Drawing on a g...

Radical policy change in countries’ higher education tuition fee and subsidy systems has become increasingly uncommon over time. This chapter explains why the Four Worlds of Student Finance are so sustainable and path dependent. My central argument for these path dependencies is that positive feedback-effects of the higher education policies on peo...

Why do students in some countries pay tremendously high tuition fees while students elsewhere study free of charge? Why do only some countries offer student financial aid? Reviewing the existing literature, this chapter concludes that convincing explanations for the variation in tuition-subsidy systems are missing. I thus propose a new explanation,...

How can we explain the historical origins of the Four Worlds of Student Finance? This chapter tests my Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory explanation of the development of tuition fee and subsidy policies in four qualitative case studies. The chapter traces the making of higher education tuition fee and subsidy policies in four countries representing t...

This chapter analyzes party positions on higher education policies, particularly tuition fees and subsidies. The literature thus far has largely neglected to study party positions on (higher) education empirically, mainly due to a lack of comparative data. Against this background, I exploit expert survey data on party preferences towards higher edu...

This chapter summarizes the book’s main findings. It shows that the empirical chapters, combining several qualitative and quantitative analyses in a multi-method design, offer strong support for the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory: the partisan composition of government, particularly the sequence and duration of different parties in office, explains...

Why do the advanced democracies differ so much with regards to their tuition-subsidy systems? This chapter tests whether the Time-Sensitive Partisan Theory can explain the Four Worlds of Student Finance by analyzing parties’ impact on both tuition fees and financial student aid across 21 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)...