Election Campaigns and Education 1945-2003: A Quantitative Analysis of Party Manifestos in 25 Countries

Author(s):

Anja P. Jakobi

Conference:

ECER 2009

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 02 C, Approaching Education Policy (Part 2)

Paper Session. Continued from 23 SES 01 C.

Time:

2009-09-28

11:15-12:45

Room:

HG, HS 16

Chair:

Jennifer Teresa Ozga

Contribution

In this paper, I compare the political aim to expand educational opportunities in party manifestos of 25 countries of the OECD world. The research question is whether or not there are significant differences in favoring educational expansion over time, across countries and political positions. The paper is based on a new institutionalist framework: New institutionalism has repeatedly shown that education has become a common institution in current world society, but so far parties have not been the subject of inquiry. This is surprising, given the fact that institutionalization processes relevant to politics should be well observable in political statements. The paper is structured as follows: In a first step, I present the theoretical background of new institutionalism, concluding with three hypotheses related to political parties and educational expansion: We should be able to observe a growing consensus on educational expansion over time; we should able to observe this development across countries; and we should be able to observe such institutionalization in manifestos with different political positions. In a second step, I present data and methods. In the third to fifth steps, I test each of the hypotheses, differentiating the institutionalization of education over time, across countries and across different political wings. The results strongly support the theoretical assumption of new institutionalism.

Method

Methods: Descriptive statistics across time (1945 to 2003), across countries (25 countries), mainly analyzing mean values and frequencies over time, correlation analysis. Dataset: Manifesto Data Set, an acknowledged quantitative data source from comparative research in political science

Expected Outcomes

This paper represents a cross-national analysis of how far education has increasingly been mentioned in election campaigns by political parties. I show that the overall coverage of education in election campaigns has increased over the years. However, not all countries are equally affected by this development, and there are still differences in left-wing and right-wing parties - even if these decline.

References

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Author Information

Anja P. Jakobi

University of Bremen

SFB 597 Transtate Research Center

Bremen

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