The Politics of Higher Education Governance Reform in Western Europe

There has been ample reform activity with regard to the approach to governance of higher education in Europe since the late 1980s. The initial impetus behind these reforms has been linked to the introduction of governance approaches stemming from New Public Management (NPM) leading to somewhat similar reform rationales throughout Western Europe. At the same time, European countries have approached the issue of governance reforms from very different starting points, and still today there is significant national diversity in the governance approaches towards the higher education sectors. Overall, differing starting points, a converging reform rhetoric, but also diverging interests of different involved actors characterize governance reforms in higher education in Europe. This makes for a complex political environment and it is the overall aim of this chapter to provide a detailed account of the state of the art of academic research on this issue and make an argument for the importance of key political actors such as political parties in contemporary discussions about higher education governance. To this end, we will in a first step present a structured overview of the literature on politics of higher education governance reforms in Western Europe, which is then followed by an empirical analysis focusing on one specific factor that influences governance reforms and national variation in higher education governance in Europe, namely the preferences of political parties. In this, we will analyze to what extent different party families (e.g. social democrats or Christian democrats) have diverging preferences with regard to higher education governance and whether and how parties with a similar ideological background differ in their preferences across national contexts. This is based on an analysis and comparison of party manifestos from parties from six countries to identify both inter-party and inter-country differences with regard to policy preferences.