Education and social protection policies in OECD countries: Social stratification and policy intervention

Abstract

We examine the relationship between education and social protection policies across OECD countries and thereby contribute to the growing political and academic discussion on how social investment and social protection are interrelated. We focus on how government policy in two policy domains (education, social protection) affects social stratification. The paper is based on a principal methodological innovation, which lies in disaggregating the ways in which policy-makers influence stratification into two distinct dimensions: one is concerned with how much the state intervenes in the provision of education/social protection and how much it leaves to individual, family and market, and the second is concerned with the bias towards equality or stratification found in the state system itself. We find that countries can be grouped into a distinct number of education–social protection typologies, which differ from traditional clusterings and could indicate the need for multi-faceted pan-European education policies that take into account the longstanding differences in stratification as opposed to one-size-fits-all policy initiatives.