From the Ballot to the Blackboard: The Redistributive Political Economy of Education

Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics

by Ben W. Ansell

From the Ballot to the Blackboard provides the first comprehensive account of the political economy of education spending across the developed and developing world. The book demonstrates how political forces like democracy and political partisanship and economic factors like globalization deeply impact the choices made by voters, parties, and leaders in financing education. The argument is developed through three stories that track the historical development of first, its original expansion from the elite to the masses; second, the partisan politics of education in industrialized states; and third, the politics of higher education. The book uses a variety of complementary methods to demonstrate the importance of redistributive political motivations in explaining education policy, including formal modeling, statistical analysis of survey data and both sub-national and cross-national data, and historical case analyses of countries including the Philippines, India, Malaysia, England, Sweden, and Germany.

Genres: Politics, Political Science

268 pages, Hardcover

First published April 29, 2006

About the author

Dr. Ben W. Ansell is a professor of Comparative Democratic Institutions at Nuffield College. His work focuses on both comparative politics and international relations. He is also co-editor of the academic journal Comparative Political Studies.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The field of comparative political economy has not developed a comprehensive framework for understanding how and why governments invest in educational spending. This is important given the rise in average educational spending and the increase in variation within countries, but also because of the limitations of simple models (i.e. Median Voter Theorem) to explain straightforward discrepancies such as variation in spending within Western European and Sub-Saharan African regions. Ansell's work, which won a major dissertation award at the 2011 American Political Science Association conference, seeks to directly address this shortcoming.

Ansell makes two primary contributions to the political economy of education literature. For one, education is essentially redistributive and has the potential to result in strange coalitions of interest groups. Because the costs of educational expansion are borne by the rich and the middle class is most likely to be the primary beneficiary of educational expansion, there will be a tendency toward non-expansion in autocracies (ends against the middle) and toward expansion in democracies. Ansell describes a number of mechanisms through which this redistribution occurs (p. 6-7) that help to predict how coalitions form. Secondly, integration with the global economy will result in greater education expansion in both types of institutional/governance structures, but there will be a greater supply side effect in autocracies (i.e. rich can reap higher returns in this case than poor). Although labor and political economists have long highlighted market forces as being strongly deterministic of how/when governments will invest in education (i.e. Goldin and Katz, Acemoglu) , often neglected is the role of globalization in labor supply and demand. Addressing the field of political science directly, Ansell argues that previous studies focused on the socializing aspects of educational investment (i.e.certain types of curriculum) and neglected the importance of individuals/voters preferences in shaping government policymaking. Building a rich set of formal theoretical models, he tests a number of claims using a series of cross-national datasets on education spending. In this way, Ansell situates his work within a broad literature encompassing economics, political science and cross-national sociology.

Though I highlight the above contributions as primary, Ansell develops a number of additional hypotheses about when and where individuals and governments invest (or fail to invest) in private schooling, about the relationship between democracy and relative education spending, and in the relationship between governance and type of education spending (i.e. primary vs. tertiary). The strength of Ansell's work lies in the comprehensive nature of his framework, and the ambition of building on a broad but fragmented literature across a number of disciplines. He also complements his empirical analysis with a set of country case studies which are designed to highlight some of the puzzles laid out at the outset of the book. Why has India, the largest and among the most robust democracies among lower income countries, failed to invest in education while Malaysia, a relative autocracy, invested heavily in education? Ansell shows how the relationship between democracy and education spending is complicated by the effect of globalization on the decision of individuals to invest in schooling and the demand from employers for skills.

[Elizabeth Balbachevsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit old, so also a bit outdated, mostly because of the pace changes are happening around the world. Nevertheless, it is a must if you want to know in more detail the links between political processes and policy choices in the education field. Science policy seldom looks at the field of education, so the book is a welcome addition, helping to fill this gap.