[Séminaire général] Policy feedback, education, and party strategies

The mass expansion of education has created a new cadre of left voters, but the center-left parties that supported mass educational expansion have largely failed to capture the support of this new constituency over the long run. In Europe’s proportional electoral systems, support for center-left parties has plummeted across all groups and in majoritarian election systems, the center-left has have failed to hold together a cross-class coalition. The result is the well-known fragmentation of the electoral space. 

This talk asks why educational expansion operated so differently to past welfare policy expansions – in health, pensions and income security – that often helped to stabilize electoral constituencies, particularly for the center-left. I present a novel theorization of partisan policy feedback, looking at when policies provide benefits that build and stabilize electoral coalitions. Drawing on decades of elections studies and public opinion data, I show that education operates more like a one-time endowment than a future oriented form of insurance. This created culturally left-leaning voters that were not strongly vested in long-run distributive coalitions. I expand the implications of this analysis for thinking about the interaction between policymaking and coalition building in the current moment.

Speaker

Jane Gingrich, University of Oxford

Jane Gingrich is a Professor of Social Policy at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention (DSPI), University of Oxford and a Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College. She was previously Professor of Comparative Political Economy at the Department of Politics and International Relations and Tutorial Fellow at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Jane’s areas of expertise are Comparative Political Economy and Comparative Social Policy with a particular interest in the contemporary restructuring of the welfare state and the politics of institutional change.

Chair 

William Genieys, Sciences Po, CEE 

Discussant 

Charlotte Boucher, Sciences Po, CEE