Bildung und die "neue" sozialdemokratie: Eine analyse aus der sicht der vergleichenden staatsausgabenforschung

Abstract

The rhetoric of "reformed" social democracy has emphasized education and investment in human capital formation since the 1990s. Nevertheless, scholarly accounts of social democratic government policies have neglected the study of education politics. This article addresses the question of whether the move from traditional to reformist social democracy can be traced in the analysis of public social and education spending in the 1980s and 1990s. I show that government participation of social democrats went along with increases in social transfer spending in the 1980s, whereas in the 1990s, social democrats have instead increased spending on education, and higher education in particular, and curtailed spending on social transfers. The final section of the article discusses the implications of these findings for the future development of partisan theory.