The Partisan Politics of Higher Education

Higher education is a mixed blessing: it can promote equality of opportunity, foster educational and socioeconomic upward mobility, contribute to countries' knowledge production and economic growth, and even lead to higher levels of health and life satisfaction. However, higher education also can be a tool of the reproduction of existing elites, it can plunge students into lifelong debt, and it can cause "negative redistribution" from the poor to the rich because the better-off are more likely to benefit from publicly funded college. Thus, depending on the composition of an existing education system, higher education can either mitigate or reinforce prevailing social, economic, and educational inequalities. These complex (re)distributive dynamics make higher education an extremely interesting and relevant field of study for political scientists, particularly regarding the role of political parties. Do left-wing parties expand higher education (i.e., spending) because of its progressive implications, or are right-wing parties the main proponent because of its regressive consequences? This article reviews the state of the art of the existing country-comparative literature on the partisan politics of higher education in advanced democracies. I argue that important variations in higher-education systems can be understood only by considering the partisan politics behind these regimes. The argument and the literature on which it is based are presented as follows. I begin by discussing early studies inspired by welfare-state research, positing that parties have continuously exercised strong influence on higher-education systems. The main question in this literature was whether left-wing or right-wing parties expand higher education. Second, I turn to newer approaches, arguing that the effect of parties is not this simple and linear but rather conditional on the status quo of the specific education system and the type of spending. Third, against this background, I examine approaches claiming that the impact of parties on higher-education policy has decreased over time, which is attributed to positive feedback effects resulting in path dependencies. The article concentrates on comparative work of the advanced economies between 1945 and 2015, which is mainly quantitative because it focuses on quantifiable comparable outcomes, such as public spending and enrollment levels. This international perspective helps in understanding the complex politics of higher education