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Cambridge Studies in the Comparative Politics of Education aims to encourage a vigorous new line of scholarship that in substance, theory, and focus leads to the emergence of a stronger, more coherent literature on the comparative politics of education. The series will appeal to scholars of comparative politics, education, and education policy.

  • General Editors: Terry Moe, Stanford University, California

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10 results in Cambridge Studies in the Comparative Politics of Education

Culture and Mass Schooling
  • The Colonial Roots of Educational Inequality in Africa
  • Melina R. Platas
  • Published online:
    10 December 2025
    Print publication:
    22 January 2026
  • Education is central to politics, economic growth, and human well-being. Yet large gaps in levels of education persist across different groups, often for generations. Why? This book argues that culture – specifically, community norms about schooling – plays a central role in explaining the persistence of educational inequality across groups. Melina R. Platas uses the case of the Muslim-Christian education gap in Africa, where Muslims have on average three fewer years of education than Christians, to examine the origins and persistence of educational inequality. She documents the colonial origins of this gap and develops a cultural theory of its persistence, focusing on the case studies of Malawi, Nigeria and Uganda. Platas uses census and survey data from nearly 30 African countries, archival documents, interviews, focus groups, and coordination games to explore this ubiquitous yet underappreciated gap in educational attainment, and to measure divergent schooling norms across religious communities in Africa today.

No Adult Left Behind
  • How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids
  • Vladimir Kogan
  • Published online:
    07 August 2025
    Print publication:
    21 August 2025
  • For decades, Americans have debated why our students consistently score lower than their peers in other developed countries. While most debates have focused on school spending, curriculum, teacher quality, and teachers' unions, No Adult Left Behind argues that local democratic control is the root of the problem. Elected school boards govern local school districts, but only adults vote in local elections – most of whom don't have children or care about academics. This leads to educational debates that are centered around issues that adults care most about, such as partisanship, identity politics, property values, and employment concerns, while the needs of students get left behind. In identifying the misalignment between the interests of school children and the political and policy agendas of the adults who control education, No Adult Left Behind stands to become a landmark study on modern education politics.

Who Controls Education?
  • The Rising Power of Vested Interests in Europe
  • Susanne Wiborg
  • Published online:
    26 March 2025
    Print publication:
    03 April 2025
  • Why are interest groups on the march in Europe? How do they become so powerful? Why do reformers struggle with plans to overhaul education systems? In Who Controls Education?, Susanne Wiborg investigates the dynamics of educational interest groups across four European countries: England, France, Germany and Sweden, alongside their counterparts in the European Union. She delves into why some groups wield more power than others and how they gain access to policymaking venues to shape education reforms. The book reveals a gap between reformers' intentions and policy outcomes, often attributed to group politics, with significant consequences for education users, historically a weak organisational group. Wiborg shows that addressing the role of vested interest is crucial for creating an education system where all children benefit.

Mobilizing Teachers
  • Education Politics and the New Labor Movement in Latin America
  • Christopher Chambers-Ju
  • Published online:
    16 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • The political participation of public school teachers in new democracies has generated heated debates. In some countries, teacher strikes shutter schools for months each year; in others, teachers' unions have become powerful political machines and have even formed new political parties. To explain these contrasts, Mobilizing Teachers delves into changes in education politics and the labor movement. Christopher Chambers-Ju argues that union organizations fundamentally shape teacher mobilization, with far-reaching implications for politics and policy. With detailed case studies of Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, this book is the first comparative analysis of teacher politics in Latin America. Drawing on extensive field research and multiple sources of data, it enriches theoretical perspectives in political science and sociology on the interplay between protests, electoral mobilization, and party alliances. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

A Liberal Education
  • The Social and Political Impact of the Modern University
  • Brendan Apfeld, Emanuel Coman, John Gerring, Stephen Jessee
  • Published online:
    28 February 2024
    Print publication:
    18 January 2024
  • Enlisting a natural experiment, global surveys, and historical data, this book examines the university's evolution and its contemporary impact. Its authors conduct an unprecedented big-data comparative study of the consequences of higher education on ideology, democratic citizenship, and more. They conclude that university education has a profound effect on social and political attitudes across the world, greater than that registered by social class, gender, or age. A university education enhances political trust and participation, reduces propensities to crime and corruption, and builds support for democracy. It generates more tolerant attitudes toward social deviance, enhances respect for rationalist inquiry and scientific authority, and usually encourages support for Leftist parties and movements. It does not nurture support for taxation, redistribution, or the welfare state, and may stimulate opposition to these policies. These effects are summarized by the co-authors as liberal, understood in its classic, nineteenth-century meaning.

Education for All?
  • Literature, Culture and Education Development in Britain and Denmark
  • Cathie Jo Martin
  • Published online:
    27 September 2023
    Print publication:
    21 September 2023
  • Why did Denmark develop mass education for all in 1814, while Britain created a public-school system only in 1870 that primarily educated academic achievers? Cathie Jo Martin argues that fiction writers and their literary narratives inspired education campaigns throughout the nineteenth-century. Danish writers imagined mass schools as the foundation for a great society and economic growth. Their depictions fortified the mandate to educate all people and showed neglecting low-skill youth would waste societal resources and threaten the social fabric. Conversely, British authors pictured mass education as harming social stability, lower-class work, and national culture. Their stories of youths who overcame structural injustices with individual determination made it easier to blame students who failed to seize educational opportunities. Novel and compelling, Education for All? uses a multidisciplinary perspective to offer a unique gaze into historical policymaking. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Making Bureaucracy Work
  • Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India
  • Akshay Mangla
  • Published online:
    18 November 2022
    Print publication:
    01 December 2022
  • What makes bureaucracy work for the least advantaged? Across the world, countries have adopted policies for universal primary education. Yet, policy implementation is uneven and not well understood. Making Bureaucracy Work investigates when and how public agencies deliver primary education across rural India. Through a multi-level comparative analysis and more than two years of ethnographic field research, Mangla opens the 'black box' of Indian bureaucracy to demonstrate how differences in bureaucratic norms - informal rules that guide public officials and their everyday relations with citizens - generate divergent implementation patterns and outcomes. While some public agencies operate in a legalistic manner and promote compliance with policy rules, others engage in deliberation and encourage flexible problem-solving with local communities, thereby enhancing the quality of education services. This book reveals the complex ways bureaucratic norms interact with socioeconomic inequalities on the ground, illuminating the possibilities and obstacles for bureaucracy to promote inclusive development.

The Politics of Comprehensive School Reforms
  • Cleavages and Coalitions
  • Katharina Sass
  • Published online:
    18 August 2022
    Print publication:
    25 August 2022
  • Why are school systems structured differently across countries? The Politics of Comprehensive School Reform examines this question through an in-depth analysis of school politics in Germany and Norway during the post-war period of educational expansion. Using a Rokkanian theoretical framework, the book argues that school politics can only be understood in light of the cleavages, or political divides, that shape actors' interests, ideologies, and inclinations for who they want to cooperate with – or not. The book analyzes cross-cutting cleavages connected to religion, geography, language, anticommunism, and gender, and demonstrates how Norwegian social democrats and German Christian democrats built successful coalitions by mobilizing support from different social groups. Extensively researched and expansively applicable, this book contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on the politics of education, and to the field of comparative welfare and education regime research. This book is also available Open Access on Cambridge Core.

A Loud but Noisy Signal?
  • Public Opinion and Education Reform in Western Europe
  • Marius R. Busemeyer, Julian L. Garritzmann, Erik Neimanns
  • Published online:
    14 September 2020
    Print publication:
    03 September 2020
  • This path-breaking addition to the Comparative Politics of Education series studies the influence of public opinion on the contemporary politics of education reform in Western Europe. The authors analyze new data from a survey of public opinion on education policy across eight countries, and they also provide detailed case studies of reform processes based on interviews with policy-makers and stakeholders. The book's core finding is that public opinion has the greatest influence in a world of 'loud' politics, when salience is high and attitudes are coherent. In contrast, when issues are salient but attitudes are conflicting, the signal of public opinion turns 'loud, but noisy' and party politics have a stronger influence on policy-making. In the case of 'quiet' politics, when issue salience is low, interest groups are dominant. This book is required reading for anyone seeking to make sense of policy-makers' selective responsiveness to public demands and concerns.

The Comparative Politics of Education
  • Teachers Unions and Education Systems around the World
  • Edited by Terry M. Moe, Susanne Wiborg
  • Published online:
    22 December 2016
    Print publication:
    28 November 2016
  • Public education is critically important to the human capital, social well-being, and economic prosperity of nations. It is also an intensely political realm of public policy that is heavily shaped by power and special interests. Yet political scientists rarely study education, and education researchers rarely study politics. This volume attempts to change that by promoting the development of a coherent, thriving field on the comparative politics of education. As an opening wedge, the authors carry out an 11-nation comparative study of the political role of teachers unions, showing that as education systems everywhere became institutionalized, teachers unions pursued their interests by becoming well-organized, politically active, highly influential - and during the modern era, the main opponents of neoliberal reform. Across diverse nations, the commonalities are striking. The challenge going forward is to expand on this study's scope, theory, and evidence to bring education into the heart of comparative politics.