Marius R Busemeyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 284367 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marius R Busemeyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marius R |
| FAMILY NAME | Busemeyer |
| SIGNATURE | BUSEMEYER M R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Konstanz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4085-1689 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 86 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1294 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 20 |
The comparative political economy of inequality
Keeping up with the Joneses? Perceptions of mobility and opportunity within local knowledge economies across Germany
Recent work on the rise of the knowledge economy has identified the importance of economic context in shaping individual perceptions and preferences. Combining novel survey and locally fine-grained data for the case of Germany, we analyze the association between local knowledge economies and individual perceptions of social mobility and economic opportunity. We find that individual perceptions of mobility, access to affordable housing, and employ…
Foundations for a green economy
Policymakers, companies, trade unions, and civil society actors increasingly recognize the urgent need to facilitate the transition to a low-carbon economy. This Perspective highlights the critical role of “green skills” in this transition. Our article identifies avenues for future research, grounded in the institutional foundations of skill formation processes. We emphasize the global nature of this challenge and the diverse institutional contex…
Individual ideology and biased perceptions of relative income position
In this paper, we focus on individuals’ perceptions of their own position within the income distribution and argue that ideological biases influence these perceptions. In particular, we take into account the two-dimensional ideological space of European party systems and develop arguments about social class misidentification (economic dimension) and cultural threat and privilege (cultural dimension), leading to either over- or underestimation. We…
Who Supports the Digitalization of Education? New Survey Evidence From Six OECD Countries
This paper investigates how citizens perceive and evaluate the digitalization of education. Drawing on original survey data from six OECD countries (Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the US), the study addresses the overarching question: Does public opinion support or inhibit the digital transformation of education? The analysis focuses on three core aspects in this regard—perceptions of state performance, demand for digital device use i…
Equal rights to move? Public attitudes towards the free movement of patients, students and workers in the EU
While the free movement of people is one of the cornerstones of the European integration project, a pressing question remains whether public support depends on who is moving. Against the backdrop of increasing debates on the development of a European Health Union, this study focuses on the case of patient mobility and compares support levels to those of student and worker mobility rights. To this end, the study draws on an original survey conduct…
Who supports tuition fees? How information provision and policy design shapes public preferences for higher education financing
The analysis of public support for tuition fees has received little attention so far in the growing literature on the political economy of higher education and redistribution. This paper addresses this research gap, using novel survey data for the German resident population ( N = 6208). Using a survey experiment, this study finds evidence that providing respondents with information about existing inequalities in the access to and financing of hig…
Between ideology and self-interest
This paper studies public opinion towards the introduction of a universal basic income in the case of Germany. Using novel data from a vignette survey experiment conducted in the summer of 2022, we analyse to what extent variations in the policy design characteristics of a hypothetical basic income scheme affect levels of support. We find that support for basic income strongly depends on these characteristics, with support being highest for schem…
Digitalization and the green transition
How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? We address these questions in this paper by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labor market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel cross‐country comparative survey data includin…
Who cares for the future? Exploring public attitudes towards the needs of future generations in Germany
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 w…
Migration levels and welfare support
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 …
Public preferences for social investment versus compensation policies in Social Europe
The recent enactment of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) has significantly strengthened the social dimension of the European Union (EU), including the social investment (SI) elements of that social dimension. What is not known, however, to what extent the priorization of SI is supported by the broader public. To address this research gap, we investigate public opinion on 15 different policy areas from the EPSR using Eurobarometer data …
Social policy, public investment or the environment? Exploring variation in individual-level preferences on long-term policies
This article studies individual-level attitudes towards long-term investment policies using novel survey data for the case of Germany. Building on a budding literature on the relationship between environmental and social policy attitudes, our first contribution to research is to show that citizens, when prompted to think about their support for long-term investment policies, support welfare state related policies such as investments in education …
Knowledge, skills or social mobility? Citizens' perceptions of the purpose of education
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 educatio…
Financing the welfare state in times of extreme crisis
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…
Carbon inequality and support for carbon taxation
Stringent policies that significantly increase the cost of greenhouse gas emissions, such as CO2, are increasingly necessary for mitigating climate change. Yet while richer individuals in society generate the most CO2 emissions and thus will face the largest absolute cost burden, they also tend to be more supportive of stringent environmental policies. In this paper, we examine how information about the distribution of carbon emissions by income …
Public opinion towards welfare state reform
The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post‐industrial 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 conditions are citizens willing to accept such future‐oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hith…
Dealing with Technological Change
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 …
Orchestrators of coordination
Liberalization poses significant challenges for the continued provision of collective goods within coordinated market economies (CME). Extant scholarship suggests two dominant sets of responses. Either CMEs continue to rely on employer coordination, but only for a privileged core, leading to dualization. Or, in cases where the state enjoys high capacity, the state instead compensates for liberalization but ends up crowding out employer coordinati…
How to study the populist radical right and the welfare state
This review article and special issue introduction argues that studying the relationship between the populist radical right and the welfare state requires bridging literatures that have so far advanced with little mutual engagement: party politics and voting behaviour research on the one hand, and comparative political economy and welfare state research on the other. In this way, the article highlights the advantages of connecting different acade…
Digitalization and the Welfare State
Digitalization is likely to have a lasting impact on work, welfare, health, education, and the income distribution. It will radically transform not only social risks but also the means by which these are addressed. The contributions to this volume explore how digitalization—in different forms—affects the welfare state. They study how it influences concrete social policies as well as the underlying power relationship between actors, i.e. the polit…
Preferred policy responses to technological change
How do the labor market risks associated with technological change affect policy preferences? We argue that higher perceptions of technology-related risks should increase support for compensation and decrease support for social investment. We expect the opposite effect for individuals who use technology constantly at work, have a university degree and earn higher incomes. However, as the perception of technology-related employment risks in the la…
The welfare state in really hard times
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 betw…
Social Investment, Redistribution or Basic Income? Exploring the Association Between Automation Risk and Welfare State Attitudes in Europe
Rapid technological change – the digitalization and automation of work – is challenging contemporary welfare states. Most of the existing research, however, focuses on its effect on labor market outcomes, such as employment or wage levels. In contrast, this paper studies the implications of technological change for welfare state attitudes and preferences. Compared to previous work on this topic, this paper adopts a much broader perspective regard…
From Collectivism towards Segmentalism
This paper argues that the German system of vocational training is undergoing subtle but significant changes from a mainly collectivist system to a more segmentalist one. To\nmake the argument, the paper first discusses the two logics of collectivism and segmentalism, and how the German system is characterized by longstanding tensions between competing collectivist and segmentalist interests. In the empirical section, recent trends in the German …
Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing
This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state pr…
Public demand for social investment
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…
Public opinion on policy and budgetary trade-offs in European welfare states
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 on individual-level preferences in eight European countries. Paying particular attention to fiscal an…
From myth to reality
The prevailing but not unchallenged ‘conventional wisdom’ in the literature dealing with the impact of globalisation on public spending is that the effects of increased openness can be compensated through the welfare state. Repeatedly, studies have found little evidence for a ‘race to the bottom’ in taxation or spending. This research note shows that it is premature to conclude that globalisation has no negative impact on public spending. By exte…
Determinants of public education spending in 21 OECD democracies, 1980–2001
This paper focuses on the analysis of determinants of public education spending in OECD countries. It starts out by reviewing and replicating the model presented by Castles (1989, 1998), finding that only a few of his explanatory variables remain significant in a pooled time-series framework. I present an alternative model that contains socio-economic, political, and institutional variables: the level of economic development, the magnitude of dem…
Beyond Positive and Negative
The study of policy feedback on public attitudes and policy preferences has become a growing area of research in recent years. Scholars in the tradition of Pierson usually argue that positive, self-reinforcing feedback effects dominate (that is, attitudes are commensurate with existing institutions), whereas the public thermostat model developed by Wlezien and Soroka expects negative, self-undermining feedback. Moving beyond the blunt distinction…
Fiscal austerity and the trade-off between public investment and social spending
This article makes two claims: first, it argues that the impact of fiscal austerity varies across different types of public spending. In particular, we show that discretionary spending (public investment) is hit harder by fiscal austerity than entitlement spending (public spending on pensions and unemployment) because of different institutional and political constraints. Second, we find that electoral institutions affect how governments solve thi…
Asset specificity, institutional complementarities and the variety of skill regimes in coordinated market economies
The concept of asset specificity has become very prominent in the literature on\nskill formation, welfare states and labour markets. Building on the varieties of\ncapitalism (VoC) school, this paper points out three distinct shortcomings of\nthis literature: first, the VoC approach does not fully account for the variation\nof skill regimes in coordinated market economies (CMEs); second, the VoC\napproach underestimates the importance of authorita…
Authoritarian values and the welfare state
What kind of welfare state do voters of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) want and how do their preferences differ from voters of mainstream left- and right-wing parties? In this paper, we draw on an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related social policies in eight Western European countries to measure (1) support for social transfers, (2) support for workfare and (3) support for social investment. Challengi…
Institutional Sources of Business Power
Recent years have seen a revival of debates about the role of business and the sources of business power in postindustrial political economies. Scholarly accounts commonly distinguish between structural sources of business power, connected to its privileged position in capitalist economies, and instrumental sources, related to direct forms of lobbying by business actors. The authors argue that this distinction overlooks an important third source …
Conflictive preferences towards social investments and transfers in mature welfare states
This article explores potential cleavages and conflicts between political support coalitions of social investment versus classical social transfer policies. To that extent, we analyse international survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 21 European countries. Our central finding is that different welfare state beneficiary groups perceive and react negatively to increased government involvement in policy fields from which they do no…
Public opinion towards welfare state reform
The traditional welfare state, which emerged as a response to industrialization, is not well equipped to address the challenges of today's post‐industrial 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 conditions are citizens willing to accept such future‐oriented reforms? We point at the crucial but hith…
Dealing with Technological Change
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 …
The Welfare State with Private Alternatives
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 i…
Who Owns Education? Cleavage Structures in the Partisan Competition over Educational Expansion
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 has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over th…
Social democrats and the new partisan politics of public investment in education
This paper studies the impact on public education spending of social democratic participation in government. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of spending in OECD democracies, it is shown that social democrats have increased public spending primarily on higher education. This finding is at odds with simple class-based models of partisan preferences (Boix) that predict a preference for non-tertiary education. As an alternative, the notion …
Investing in education in Europe
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 and other social policies, nor do they provide information about citizens’ willingness to pay for ad…
The politics of opting out
In this paper, we address two empirical puzzles: Why are cross-country differences in the division of labour between public and private education funding so large and why are they politically sustainable in the long term? We argue that electoral institutions play a crucial role in shaping politico-economic distributive coalitions that affected the original division of labour in education financing. In proportional representation systems, the lowe…
Inequality and the political economy of education
Scholarly interest in the study of education from the perspective of political science has increased rapidly in the last few years. However, the literature focuses on comparing education politics at the country level, neglecting the analysis of micro-level foundations of education policies in terms of individual preferences and their interaction with macro contexts. This paper provides a first step in addressing this research gap, engaging in a m…
The future of the social investment state
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 consolidation and transformation since the 1980s. Against early fears, retrenchment has not been 'the only g…
Financing the welfare state in times of extreme crisis
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…
Preferred policy responses to technological change
How do the labor market risks associated with technological change affect policy preferences? We argue that higher perceptions of technology-related risks should increase support for compensation and decrease support for social investment. We expect the opposite effect for individuals who use technology constantly at work, have a university degree and earn higher incomes. However, as the perception of technology-related employment risks in the la…
How Popular Are Social Investment Policies Really? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Eight Western European Countries
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 comparative surveys of public opinion usually do not take into account how citizens perceive and react to po…
The partisan politics of early childhood education in the German Länder
This article analyses the role of partisan politics in the recent expansion of early childhood education and care in the German Länder. In contrast to recent work in comparative public policy that often diagnoses a waning of partisan effects, we find broad support for the notion that partisan differences continue to matter in this policy field. The government participation of left-wing parties is positively and significantly associated with chang…
Dualization, stratification, liberalization, or what? An attempt to clarify the conceptual underpinnings of the dualization debate
Despite its many contributions, a central problem in the dualization debate is conceptual overstretching, as we will argue in this short comment. The term “dualization” has been used to describe different processes, which are often subsumed under this heading: the rise of atypical employment, increasing labor market stratification in general, or the partial deregulation of welfare state policies and institutions. This multitude of usages weakens …
Pension Reform in Germany and Austria
This article first outlines the differences in outcome of pension reform in Germany and Austria. The 2001 German pension reform cut benefits very little, but it started a system changing transformation process by strengthening the second (occupational pensions) and third pillar (private pensions). The 2003 Austrian pension reform, pushed through against major opposition from the labour unions, contains very few elements of policy innovation, but …
Der Kampf um knappe Mittel
Determinants of public education spending in 21 OECD democracies, 1980–2001
This paper focuses on the analysis of determinants of public education spending in OECD countries. It starts out by reviewing and replicating the model presented by Castles (1989, 1998), finding that only a few of his explanatory variables remain significant in a pooled time-series framework. I present an alternative model that contains socio-economic, political, and institutional variables: the level of economic development, the magnitude of dem…
Attitudes Towards Redistributive Spending in an Era of Demographic Aging
Overstretching solidarity? Trade unions' national perspectives on the European economic and social model
The development of a European economic and social model poses serious challenges for European trade unions. On the one hand, demand for a strengthening of the social dimension of the European integration project is growing and it is realised that this cannot be achieved by unilateral action at the national level. On the other hand, the identities and organisational capacities of trade unions are deeply embedded in national welfare state instituti…
The Impact of Fiscal Decentralisation on Education and Other Types of Spending
Scholars have argued about the impact of fiscal decentralisation on public spending for a long time without coming to any firm theoretical and empirical conclusions. In contrast to earlier studies, this paper looks at the impact of fiscal decentralisation across different types of spending. The conventional wisdom of a “race to the bottom” in taxes and spending as a consequence of fiscal decentralization is juxtaposed to the recent literature on …
Attitudes towards redistributive spending in an era of demographic ageing
This article is about the relative impact of age and income on individual attitudes towards welfare state policies in advanced industrial democracies; that is, the extent to which the intergenerational conflict supercedes or complements intragenerational conflicts. On the basis of a multivariate statistical analysis of the 1996 ISSP Role of Government Data Set for 14 OECD countries, we find considerable age-related differences in welfare state pr…
Social democrats and the new partisan politics of public investment in education
This paper studies the impact on public education spending of social democratic participation in government. By means of a pooled time-series analysis of spending in OECD democracies, it is shown that social democrats have increased public spending primarily on higher education. This finding is at odds with simple class-based models of partisan preferences (Boix) that predict a preference for non-tertiary education. As an alternative, the notion …
From myth to reality
The prevailing but not unchallenged ‘conventional wisdom’ in the literature dealing with the impact of globalisation on public spending is that the effects of increased openness can be compensated through the welfare state. Repeatedly, studies have found little evidence for a ‘race to the bottom’ in taxation or spending. This research note shows that it is premature to conclude that globalisation has no negative impact on public spending. By exte…
Asset specificity, institutional complementarities and the variety of skill regimes in coordinated market economies
The concept of asset specificity has become very prominent in the literature on\nskill formation, welfare states and labour markets. Building on the varieties of\ncapitalism (VoC) school, this paper points out three distinct shortcomings of\nthis literature: first, the VoC approach does not fully account for the variation\nof skill regimes in coordinated market economies (CMEs); second, the VoC\napproach underestimates the importance of authorita…
Einleitung
Politikwissenschaftliche Bildungsforschung hat bislang vier Schwerpunkte: Vergleichende Policy‐Analyse, Prozesse der Internationalisierung und Europäisierung, Arbeiten der vergleichenden politischen Ökonomie sowie Studien zu den Effekten von Bildungsinstitutionen und ‐politiken. Auf der Grundlage einer dichten Analyse der gegenwärtigen Transformation und Reform von Bildungs‐ und Ausbildungssystemen in der Schweiz, Österreich und Deutschland ergän…
Institutional Change in German Vocational Training
This chapter argues that the German system of vocational training is changing in subtle but significant ways from a strongly collective system based on broad and portable occupational skills toward a segmentalist one based on increasingly differentiated skills more closely aligned to the internal needs of large companies engaged in training. In order to develop the argument, we first discuss the two logics of collectivism and segmentalism and bri…
The Political Economy of Collective Skill Formation
n Contains fulltext :\n 141526.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Closed access)\n
Individual policy preferences for vocational versus academic education
This paper uses an original dataset from a survey conducted in Switzerland in 2007 to explore the dynamics of education policy preferences. This issue has largely been neglected in that most studies on welfare state attitudes do not look at preferences for education. We argue that education policy preferences vary along two dimensions: the distribution of resources across different sectors of the education system (that is, vocational training ver…
Business as a Pivotal Actor in the Politics of Training Reform
Often admired by international observers, the German dual training system has come under pressure in recent years because of a persistent lack in training slots for young people. The article addresses the question of how policy makers have reacted to the problems in the training market. Particular attention is paid to the formation of politico‐economic coalitions between state actors, business representatives and unions. On the basis of three cas…
Inequality and the political economy of education
Scholarly interest in the study of education from the perspective of political science has increased rapidly in the last few years. However, the literature focuses on comparing education politics at the country level, neglecting the analysis of micro-level foundations of education policies in terms of individual preferences and their interaction with macro contexts. This paper provides a first step in addressing this research gap, engaging in a m…
Fiscal austerity and the trade-off between public investment and social spending
This article makes two claims: first, it argues that the impact of fiscal austerity varies across different types of public spending. In particular, we show that discretionary spending (public investment) is hit harder by fiscal austerity than entitlement spending (public spending on pensions and unemployment) because of different institutional and political constraints. Second, we find that electoral institutions affect how governments solve thi…
The impact of economic coordination and educational institutions on individual-level preferences for academic and vocational education
Integrating the literature on the varieties of capitalism with sociological studies of educational stratification, this paper argues that macro-level institutions significantly shape the relationship between educational background and preferences for different kinds of education on the micro level. In particular, we find that the institutional set-up of the education system and the degree of coordination prevailing in a given economy both have a …
Who Owns Education? Cleavage Structures in the Partisan Competition over Educational Expansion
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 has become a consensual topic. This paper analyses the cleavage structure of party competition over th…
Education Funding and Individual Preferences for Redistribution
The analysis of the association between welfare state institutions and individual-level attitudes has become an important research topic in the past years. This article focuses on the association between the institutional set-up of the education system, the division of labour between public and private sources in funding human capital formation, and preferences for redistribution. Applying a multilevel research design with International Social Su…
Partisan power, economic coordination and variations in vocational training systems in Europe
This article explores the variation of vocational education and training systems in European countries. From a survey of experts in 15 European countries, we develop a typology along two dimensions: employer involvement and public commitment. In a second step, we explain the variety of skill formation systems, highlighting the importance of partisan power and economic coordination. The causal argument is applied in three illustrative case studies…
Skills and Inequality
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 cho…
The political economy of skills and inequality
Rising socio-economic inequality is a common trend across advanced industrial democracies and its causes and consequences are still poorly understood. Certainly, the recent economic crisis has exacerbated the trend, in particular in countries most affected by the crisis, but the increase set in much earlier in the 1980s and even before. Furthermore, the trend cannot simply be explained by a return to markets because there has not been large-scale…
The politics of opting out
In this paper, we address two empirical puzzles: Why are cross-country differences in the division of labour between public and private education funding so large and why are they politically sustainable in the long term? We argue that electoral institutions play a crucial role in shaping politico-economic distributive coalitions that affected the original division of labour in education financing. In proportional representation systems, the lowe…
Bildungspolitik im internationalen Vergleich
Marius R. Busemeyer beschreibt die wesentlichen Unterschiede von Bildungssystemen in westlichen OECD-Demokratien. Er stellt methodologische und theoretische Zugänge zur Analyse von Bildungspolitik vor. Anhand konkreter Fallbeispiele werden die Besonderheiten des deutschen Bildungssystems herausgearbeitet und in einem internationalen Kontext verortet. Darüber hinaus diskutiert der Autor die Wechselwirkungen zwischen Bildungs- und Sozialpolitik
Political science (78 works) · Social Policy and Reform Studies (70 works) · Economics (68 works) · Politics (59 works) · Law (39 works) · Public economics (34 works) · Welfare state (32 works) · Market economy (31 works) · Welfare (28 works) · Economic growth (27 works)