Educational Promises over the Last 70 Years: An Analysis of Party Manifestos

• In Event: Children, Families and Politics in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Abstract

The provision of education has long been one of the crucial roles of modern states, expanding dramatically in the post-war era through the massification of secondary education. While work on the political determinants of public spending, enrolment rates, and organizational reform have found regime and partisan differences, cross-national studies theorizing, and examining empirically, the way political actors address education rhetorically have found a growing salience of reform but fewer differences. These weak findings contrast with country specific work, showing that parties draw on different underlining frames of social equality, morality, and skills in addressing voters with regards to education reform. In order to test whether there are systematic differences over time, place and party family in educational speech, this paper draws on an original dataset of party manifestos in the EU-15 countries from 1950-present (1970s-present for Greece, Spain, and Portugal), as well as Norway, Switzerland, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It codes the educational sections of the manifestos of the largest center-left and largest center-right parties based on a detailed schema of educational aims and policy, allowing us to conduct the first systematic examination of the historical evolution of rhetoric about education services in advanced democracies. In so doing, we look at three questions. First, we examine whether rhetoric varies in its aims across three epochs of education policy: early expansion (1950-65), the rise of participatory/student movements (1965-1985) and the in the era of `skill biased technological change’ (1985-present). Second, we examine how parties use different conceptions of educational equity – education as a tool for compressing social differences, education as a tool for expanding merit-based allocation to elite positions, and education as tool for remediating particular forms of group inequalities (race, gender, class, and region). As a third step we examine how generic aims are linked to different types of policy proposals (e.g. funding, testing) over time.

Authors

• Anja S Giudici, University of Oxford

• Jane R. Gingrich, University of Oxford