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Bringing political parties into the picture: a two-dimensional analytical framework for higher education policy

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Abstract

This article examines conceptually the role of political parties in higher education policy. It discusses in how far political parties matter for changes in higher education policy, whether they offer different policy positions that might result in differing policy outputs and how one can conceptualize these differences. To do so, it develops a two-dimensional analytical framework consisting of one dimension that captures re-distributive conflicts and one dimension that captures conflicts over the control of the higher education system. To exemplify this, the article presents illustrative higher education systems and develops hypotheses about where different parties would ideally position themselves in relation to the framework. The article expands on these ideal positions by introducing different forms of path dependencies that might limit political parties and thus lead to a situation of constrained partisan preferences. Finally, it proposes a research agenda based on the analytical framework and the hypotheses generated from it. Overall, the article argues that political parties can be expected to favour different higher education systems and thus matter for changes in higher education policy.

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Notes

  1. One of the most detailed studies addressing the link between political parties and higher education finds an inverse-U shaped relationship between the left–right orientation of a party and the level of attention paid to higher education policy in its election manifesto (Ansell 2010, 137ff). This leads to the conclusion that parties at the extreme ends of the political spectrum don’t offer electoral platforms with detailed higher education policies and thus can also be expected to pay only little attention to this policy field. Therefore, this article doesn’t include considerations linked to extreme parties at either end of the spectrum.

  2. The author is aware of the rather simplistic character of positioning parties on a left–right one-dimensional continuum. However, due to the fact that this division is commonly used in the cited literature and due to the focus of this article on partisan dynamics in higher education policy, there is unfortunately no room for an extensive debate about the applicability of this terminology.

  3. One attempt of addressing this issue is the recently started ERC funded INVEDUC research project at the University of Konstanz (http://www.polver.uni-konstanz.de/en/busemeyer/research/erc-project/).

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Peter Maassen, Åse Gornitzka and Martina Vukasovic for their support to this article. Furthermore, thanks are given to Ben Ansell and Marius Busemeyer for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of the paper as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and valuable comments.

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  1. Department of Education, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1092, Blindern, 0371, Oslo, Norway

    Jens Jungblut

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Jungblut, J. Bringing political parties into the picture: a two-dimensional analytical framework for higher education policy. High Educ 69, 867–882 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9810-5

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