Education is a social force of profound influence. For nations and people throughout the world, it is a prime determinant of the human capital that fuels productivity, innovation, higher incomes, and economic growth. It socializes the young and enables social integration and control. It is a springboard of upward mobility and meritocracy. It promotes citizen involvement, better health, lower crime, lower birth rates, and many other positive outcomes.
One might think, then, that governments everywhere would be investing heavily to build effective school systems and expand their reach. One might also think that this stunningly important realm of policy would be intensively studied by political scientists. Yet neither conjecture is even close to correct. How governments approach education can vary quite dramatically, not only from one nation to another but also within a given nation over time. And political scientists have failed to shed much light on any of this—or its far-reaching consequences—because (outside the subfield of political philosophy) they have not embraced education as a target of comprehensive, in-depth study.
That said, scholars have made some notable progress. Studies of “varieties of capitalism” have investigated distinctive national arrangements for vocational education and training. And a number of studies, in pursuing broader themes in comparative politics, have provided evidence that national education spending (or enrollment) is shaped by redistributive politics, that democratization and left-party control of government lead to increases in education spending (or enrollment), and that openness to the global economy does as well. But as suggestive as these studies are, they are less about education than about the larger themes, and they are centered on the specific types of education data that happen to be available and quantifiable. The research is neither broad enough nor deep enough to tell us much about national systems of education: their institutional makeup, their development over time, and their social and economic consequences. Nor does it have much to say about the actual political processes at work.
Ben Ansell's From the Ballot to the Blackboard arises out of the comparative literature on education spending, and it shares some of that literature's inherent limitations. Yet if the book is judged by reference to the existing baseline, it is surely a major contribution. The author goes well beyond what other scholars have done, and his analysis will ultimately stimulate new thinking and research that promise to vault this literature ahead.
Ansell's most general theoretical themes and empirical findings are essentially an embrace of those already in the literature: about education as a realm of class conflict and about the roles of democratization, left parties, and the openness of the economy in promoting greater national spending on education. But here the similarities end. The author provides an analysis of astonishing breadth, telling (as he puts it) three stories: the expansion of mass education by developing nations, the partisan politics of mass education in advanced industrial nations, and the politics of higher education in advanced nations. Each study is rooted in a formal model that attempts to capture the redistributionist logic of that realm of education politics, and each involves an extensive, rigorously developed analysis of cross-national panel data. Along the way, comparative case studies are explored in order to provide additional evidence of causal impacts, and to illustrate the dynamics of education spending in the politics and histories of particular countries.
There is much that is novel and valuable here. Ansell's modeling efforts are the most ambitious attempt yet to build a redistributionist theory of education: showing how the rich, the middle class, and the poor are differently affected by various educational arrangements and what it means for their political behavior and that of the parties that represent them. He is thinking big—and rigorously—about the politics of education everywhere in the world, and this is a genuine contribution. His quantitative analyses are unprecedented in scope for this literature, covering a full spectrum of nations, often over many decades; his analysis of the expansion of mass education, for example, is based on data from 115 countries from 1960 to 2000. The sheer amount of quantitative evidence that he presents—on developing and advanced nations, the various levels and types of public education, private education, political parties, voter preferences, the roles of democratization and openness to trade—is impressive, and provides scholars with a trove of findings to learn from, puzzle over, and put to use. The case studies are innovations in themselves: They are carefully chosen to allow the tracing of causal impacts within the context of particular countries, and they are enlightening. By taking in-depth looks at Portugal, Spain, and Greece, for example, Ansell shows that all three significantly increased education spending after their democratization during the 1970s, and that all three boosted education spending yet again when they later joined the European Union during the 1980s and became much more open to trade.
The book deserves these accolades, but I should briefly point to a few limitations as well. Spending data can tell us only so much. They say nothing about how the schools are organized and run or whether children are actually learning anything or who is really benefiting. In many countries, much of the money may be siphoned off for corruption or spoils. Indeed, this may be why it is being spent in the first place.
The numbers, moreover, are hardly straightforward. Ansell and others treat spending divided by GDP as a golden measure that automatically yields meaningful cross-national comparisons. But consider this. In the United States, Mississippi is among the lowest spenders per student on public education (and regularly castigated for it), and Massachusetts is among the top spenders (and regarded as a champion of quality education). Yet if their spending is divided by their state GDPs, the resulting measure reveals that Mississippi “outspends” Massachusetts. Doing this for all of the states yields an odd ranking, one that most experts would not see as reflecting the states' relative commitments to public education. There is no right or wrong here. But scholars who rely on spending data need to think carefully about their measures—and justify them. Often this does not happen, and no one ever knows what weirdness a “sophisticated” analysis might be covering up.
Questions arise about the theory as well. Ansell and others contend that education is everywhere driven by redistributive politics, and this is surely a major piece of the puzzle. But it ignores the fact that, as in any institutional system, there are vested interests in public education—mainly teachers—who are often organized and politically powerful, not just in advanced nations but in many developing nations as well. And these groups want to expand (or protect) education for reasons that typically have nothing to do with the poor. Their interests lie in jobs and money for themselves. Theories that focus just on voters (or classes) but ignore vested interests are missing a key part of what institutional politics is about, and may be mischaracterizing why education systems develop as they do.
As an analysis of education spending, then, Ansell's book is a giant step forward. But the literature still has important issues to grapple with and a way to go before education systems and their politics are well understood.
