This panel is part of the mini-symposium on "The Futue of the Social Investment State". Considered as a way to combine social justice and fiscal responsibility, social investment has become increasingly popular among policy makers. Spending on key social investment policy areas such as education and training or childcare has increased over the last decades in most advanced democracies. On the macro level, this expansion was linked to political factors such as the government partisanship with left parties being substantially keener to introduce such policies and functional factors such as the rising employment rate of women or the persistent long-term unemployment that generated a need for such policies. Whether however functional pressure translates into actual reforms, depends on the political context.

In this panel, therefore, we focus on the politics of social investment, that is on the preferences of citizens and political actors towards social investment policies as well as the implementation of social investment reforms by governments. The five papers focus on two key policy fields of social investment: Policies to reconcile work and family live and education, broadly defined. Together, they study the demand and supply side of the politics of social investment. With this question, the panel bridges research from the literature on welfare state changes, the study of social policy preferences and the literature on political representation. The abstracts of the individual papers are given below.