The Role of Parties in the Distributive Politics of Higher Education

This paper seeks to identify generalizable patterns of partisan preferences in higher education policymaking across time and between countries. While existing studies have found contradictory results, it is argued that meaningful variation lies in disentangling components of higher education policy according to their distributive implications. To this end I distinguish between finance mechanisms, enrolment supply, and quality of higher education rather than using overall spending on tertiary education as a catch-all indicator linking the composition of cabinets to policy change. Taking this conceptual framework as a reference point, I identify constraints and tradeoffs governments of different political leanings are faced with when changing policy. More specifically, I hypothesize left-leaning cabinets undertake measures to reduce income dependence of access to higher education, for example through expanding enrolments or increasing student subsidies. Conservative cabinets, on the other hand, are assumed to emphasize preservation of quality through restricting access and increasing the proportion of private on overall financing. These hypotheses are checked against the alternative explanations that macro-economic trends, problem pressure and path dependencies might take precedence over possible variation in ideological preferences of cabinets. Methodologically, I estimate hierarchical regression models with both country-years and country-cabinets as units of analysis, with the sample comprised of OECD countries. By separating within- from between-effects through the inclusion of country-specific means, I am able to explore temporal and spatial variation in spending and enrolment patterns. Because time-series data for the indicators in question are limited to the period of 1998-2013, regression results are supplemented by small case studies focusing on long-term policy developments in Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.