This paper will present a conceptual framework to analyze the relation between political party positions, social cleavages and effects of electoral institutions. It will start off by examining recent changes in European higher education policy and afterwards focus on cleavages in higher education policy and the influence of the institutions of the electoral system.
While growing participation rates changed the nature of higher education from an elite topic to one, which also touched the life of the middle-class and in some countries nearly the whole society, the policy field was reframed and debated in the context of the welfare state. However, more recent developments led to the inclusions of new issue dimensions in this policy field. From the 90s onward universities were linked to topics like knowledge creation and dissemination, technology advancement and innovation and regarded as the solution for many of society’s problems.
Following Lipset, Rokkan and Inglehart the political space in a society can be described along the lines of social cleavages. Higher education policy is also affected by these rifts. However, not all cleavage-lines have a meaningful impact in this field. Following the work of Ben Ansell, the paper highlights the importance of the distributional/re-distributional nature of (higher) education policy and conceptualizes policy positions of parties in a 2-dimensional space covering questions of access to and financing of higher education.
An important influence factor on the visibility of the aforementioned differences is the institutional set-up of a political system. Electoral institutions have both strategic as well as mechanical effects on policy positions and can limit the operating space for parties. These effects will also be addressed in the paper. Based on this the conceptual observations deliver a basis to analyze empirically how higher education policy is affected by political parties in different institutional settings.
