The Political Economy of Higher Education Finance - a Comparative Analysis of the Politics of Tuition Fees and Subsidies

Why do students in some countries pay so much for college while students in other countries study free of charge? Why do some students get financial support from their governments while the majority of students elsewhere remain empty-handed? My paper provides answers to these questions by analyzing the politics of tuition fees and subsidies. In a first step, by applying cluster analyses to a genuine dataset of 33 OECD-countries, the paper demonstrates that "Four Worlds of Student Finance” can be distinguished. What are the politico-economic driving forces that shaped these regimes? This question is especially puzzling because the higher education systems in most countries looked very much alike in the immediate post-WW-II period. My argument is that the development of the Four Worlds of Student Finance can (only) be explained by analyzing the partisan composition of government and the sequence and duration of parties in office. This argument receives support in a multi-method design, combining quantitative investigations of party positions, TSCS-analyses of party effects on policy-making, and multilevel analysis of voter preferences, with qualitative case-studies tracing the development in four diverse cases (US, JPN, GER, FIN) over the postwar time.