The expansion of secondary education constitutes the key education reform of the first post-war period (Wiborg 2009). The educational structures implemented to accommodate the increasing educational demand in advanced economies, however, have differed widely. Some countries established standardised forms of comprehensive secondary schooling that equalised provision across cohorts. Others protected tracking while increasing the standardisation of non-academic tracks, whereas a third group did implement comprehensive reforms, but refrained from standardising the offer, retaining high degrees of internal differentiations and options for parents to exit the system. 

The paper argues that political as well as education-related logics must be considered to explain these different trajectories. More specifically, they were shaped by the interaction of electoral incentives and the structure of vested educational stakeholders, namely teachers’ unions and the church. We develop the argument theoretically, drawing on insights from political-science literature on partisan politics (Ansell 2010; Gingrich 2011), and educational literature on the actors and vested interests characterising secondary schooling (Gordt 2019; Moe & Wiborg 2017; Ozga & Lawn 1981). We argue that, on the one hand, parties’ position towards de-tracking and standardisation reflects their effort to appeal to increasingly education-friendly middle-class voters, without losing support from their traditional lower-class (left) or elite (right) base. On the other hand, parties also integrated the views of allied educational stakeholders with vested interests in secondary education, namely church and teachers. Where the church aligned with the political left, the right tended to be more supportive of de-tracking and standardisation, whereas it strongly opposed such policies in situations where opposed teacher unions formed alliances against the left.

We assess the argument comparatively and by tracing selected reform processes (Bennett & Checkel 2015). First, we show that parties’ and stakeholders’ preferences, alignments, power, and reform outcomes match our expectations drawing on a novel dataset coding post-war educational actors and reforms in 20 democratic industrial economies. We complement this medium-N comparison with findings from case studies focusing on the dynamics underlying the coalitions and preferences shaping early-post war stratification reforms in selected countries, including Sweden, Italy, Australia, Belgium, and Austria.

Drawing on interdisciplinary insights, the paper provides a new framework for understanding post-war education reform. It shows that common party electoral strategies can lead to varied preferences and reforms, depending on how parties are linked to educational stakeholders. This finding raises new questions about the role of stakeholders in shaping education reform more generally -- a role which might go well beyond their ability to shape and block reforms on the ground highlighted by the literature so far (Ball et al. 2011; Giudici 2021; Wiborg & Larsen 2017).

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