Skills and Inequality studies the political economy of education and training reforms from the perspective of comparative welfare state research. Highlighting the striking similarities between ...established worlds of welfare capitalism and educational regimes, Marius R. Busemeyer argues that both have similar political origins in the postwar period. He identifies partisan politics and different varieties of capitalism as crucial factors shaping choices about the institutional design of post-secondary education. The political and institutional survival of vocational education and training as an alternative to academic higher education is then found to play an important role in the later development of skill regimes. Busemeyer also studies the effects of educational institutions on social inequality and patterns of public opinion on the welfare state and education. Adopting a multi-method approach, this book combines historical case studies of Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom with quantitative analyses of macro-level aggregate data and micro-level survey data.
This paper studies the determinants of support for future generations, using novel survey data for the case of Germany. I find significant, but not overwhelming support for prioritizing the needs of ...future generations vs. the acute needs of present-day citizens. Moreover, individual-level and contextual factors matter too. High-income and highly educated citizens are on average more supportive of the needs of future generations, the elderly and women less so. Left-wing supporters are equally more supportive of future generations, especially supporters of the Greens and those subscribing to 'green-alternative-liberal' values. Supporters of the right-wing populist AfD are most strongly opposed. General political trust boosts support for future generations, and economically thriving local economies are associated with higher levels of support for future generations as well.
Employing new and original survey data collected in three waves (April/May and November 2020 as well as May 2021) in Germany, this paper studies the dynamics of individual-level support for ...additional health care spending. A first major finding is that, so far, health care spending preferences have not radically changed during the Covid-19 pandemic, at least at the aggregate level. A more detailed analysis reveals, secondly, that individual-level support for additional spending on health care is strongly conditioned by performance perceptions and, to a lesser extent, general political trust. Citizens who regard the system as badly (well) prepared to cope with the crisis are more likely to support (oppose) additional spending. Higher levels of political trust are also positively associated with spending support, but to a lesser degree. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for policy-making and welfare state politics in the post-pandemic era.
The COVID-19 pandemic represents an enormous challenge for healthcare systems around the globe. Using original panel survey data for the case of Germany, this article studies how specific trust in ...the healthcare system to cope with this crisis has evolved during the course of the pandemic and whether this specific form of trust is associated with general political trust. The article finds strong evidence for a positive and robust association between generalized political trust and performance perceptions regarding the efficiency and fairness of the crisis response as well as individual treatment conditions. The article also shows that specific trust in healthcare remained relatively stable throughout 2020, but declined significantly in the spring of 2021.
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 European countries. We identify three latent dimensions of welfare state preferences: 'social investment'; 'passive transfers'; and 'workfare' policies. We find that social investment is far more popular compared to the other two. Furthermore, we identify distinct supporting groups: passive transfer policies are most supported by low-income, low-educated people, by individuals leaning towards traditional social values and by those subscribing to left-wing economic attitudes. Social investment policies are supported by a broad coalition of individuals with higher educational backgrounds and left-libertarian views from all economic strata. Workfare policies are most popular with high-income individuals and those subscribing to economically conservative and traditional authoritarian values.
This article explores individual views of the purpose of education. Most existing research focuses on attitudes and policy preferences; while these types of perceptions have so far been largely ...overlooked due to a lack of data. Our analysis of original survey data in eight Western European countries shows that personal socioeconomic factors and ideological predispositions shape these individual opinions. Individuals with higher levels of education and income are more likely to view education as aimed at expanding knowledge as goal by itself, and less likely to view it as a tool to promote intergenerational social mobility. Left‐leaning individuals are also more likely to regard education as a goal by itself, and less likely to view it as conferring useful labour market skills for the younger generation. Finally, we investigate the relationship between these different views and individual preferences for social policies. Our results show that the perception of education as promoting intergenerational mobility is strongly associated with support for passive transfers, while the perception of education as conferring marketable skills increases support for workfare policies. Social investment policies, because they are widely supported in the population, are not linked to specific views on education.
How does technological change affect social policy preferences across different institutional contexts? In this paper, we argue that individuals who perceive high levels of technology-related ...employment risks prefer passive policies like unemployment benefits over active measures like retraining in order to satisfy the need for immediate compensation in the case of job loss. At the same time, general support for passive (active) policy solutions to technological change should be significantly lower (higher) in countries where generous compensation schemes already exist. As the perception of technology-related employment risks increases, however, we expect that social policy preferences among high-risk individuals should converge across different welfare state contexts. We use novel data from a diverse set of 24 OECD countries that specifically measure preferred social policy solutions to technological change in a constrained choice scenario. Applying statistical methods that explicitly model the trade-off faced by individuals, we find evidence in line with our theoretical expectations.
Does migration pose a threat to welfare state legitimacy? We address this prominent question with a multilevel analysis of novel survey data, the 'Inequality Barometer', which includes individual and ...local-level context data in Germany (6208 individuals, up to 401 local districts). Our results suggest that the public is more reluctant to support welfare where the proportion of migrants at the local level is larger. This effect even persists when welfare is directed at groups that are perceived as more deserving of welfare support (like children, sick or older individuals) and when we examine the levels of employed migrants (that pay into the welfare state). We also find that these effects are moderated by economic risk. Particularly, we find that individuals facing higher economic risk support welfare less than their counterparts when exposed to migration. Future research should expand the local-level approach and investigate the causal mechanisms that the welfare-migration nexus is based on in more detail.
Private alternatives to the public provision of welfare state services and benefits have expanded in almost all OECD countries over the past decades. In this paper, we study how this change affects ...patterns of public support for the welfare state and, in the long term, the political sustainability of solidaristic social policies. Our core argument is that the availability of private alternatives undermines support for public provision of social insurance policies, in particular among the middle and upper-income classes, whose political support is crucial for the political viability of the universalist welfare state regime. We test our theoretical claim empirically with survey data from the ISSP Role of Government module for 20 OECD countries.
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