Welfare states are challenged by a shift towards skill-focused knowledge economies, changing labor markets, intensifying deindustrialization, and technological change, as well as by new public demands related to “new social risks” such as single parenthood or youth unemployment. In many countries, policy-makers’ main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented “social investment” policies that focus on creating, mobilize, and preserving human skills. Yet, the turn towards the social investment state has taken very different forms and has happened to different degrees and at different points in time in democratic countries around the globe. Existing studies focuses almost entirely on Western Europe, neglecting the fact that many democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia face similar struggles and also have adopted social investment policies. Accordingly, we lack both a descriptive overview on the types of social investment policies adopted in these countries as well as explanations of their (non-)emergence. Based on a larger research project, this symposium addresses this gap by offering comparative analyses of the politics of social investment in democratic countries around the globe. The contributions descriptively map and theoretically, as well as empirically, explain the political and socio-economic conditions for the development of social investment policies in democracies around the globe. The symposium thus offers the first worldwide analysis of the politics of social investment agendas and reforms around the globe.