Erik Neimanns

TL;DR: In this article, social investment has recently received much attention among policy-makers and welfare state scholars, but the existing literature remains focused on policy-making on the macro-level.

TL;DR: This paper conducted an original, representative survey of public opinion on education and related policies in eight European countries and found that citizens express high levels of support for education even when they are forced to choose between education and other areas of social spending.

TL;DR: In this paper, the potential cleavages and conflicts between political support coalitions of social investment versus classical social transfer policies are explored, and the authors analyse international coalitions and conflicts.

TL;DR: This article analyzed new data from a survey of public opinion on education policy across eight countries, and provided detailed case studies of reform processes based on interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders, finding that public opinion has the greatest influence in a world of 'loud' politics, when salience is high and attitudes are coherent.

TL;DR: The authors studied how support for social investment policies changes when additional spending on these policies would have to be financed with cutbacks in other parts of the welfare state and found that citizens generally dislike being forced to cut back one type of social spending to expand another, but there is a significant degree of variation across individuals and policy fields.