3 - Attitudes on Education Spending in Western Europe

Summary

This chapter analyzes attitudes and preferences toward education spending. Relying on representative survey data for eight European countries, it (1) studies what citizens want when it comes to education spending and (2) explores explanations for these preferences, i.e. the main latent political cleavages over education reform. The first part of the chapter sheds theoretical and empirical light on the question how salient is education expenditure compared to other (social) policy areas. Moreover, it explores how attitudes toward education spending relate to attitudes toward means to finance this spending (via taxation, debt, or retrenchment in other areas). The second part of the chapter studies preferences toward the distribution of spending on different sectors of the education system. The results show, among other things, that compared to other issues education is highly salient, particularly schools and vocational education and training. While public support drops considerably once increases in expenditure come at a price, there is an astonishingly high support for education-related taxes. The chapter reports evidence for several potential cleavages over education spending (e.g. along respondents’ income and educational backgrounds), the most consistent one being a partisan divide.