How Robust Is Support for Education Spending? Attitudes on Trade-Offs in a Cross-Country Analysis

This blog post is based on an article published in the Journal of Social Policy by Isik Özel, Salvador Parrado and Kerem Yildirim.

This article investigates public attitudes toward education spending using original data from five OECD countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico, and Turkey, of which three are Southern European and two are emerging economies. We conducted parallel survey experiments with a sample of circa 1,000 respondents per country to analyze if a trade-off of public spending between education and other welfare domains (healthcare, unemployment benefits, and pensions) diminishes support for the former. The experiment assigned a trade-off which conditioned a potential increase in education spending to cuts in one of these welfare domains.

In line with the literature, we find substantial support for increasing public spending on education across five countries. However, this support diminishes significantly when trade-offs that are linked to cuts in other welfare domains are introduced. We demonstrate that education spending preferences are contingent on the nature of trade-offs and the respective priorities of the stakeholder groups. These groups are defined as having a vested interest regarding specific trade-offs, such that a person—without children—who is about to retire belongs to a different stakeholder group compared to that of young parents.

Our findings on the impact of the trade-offs of public spending attitudes are broadly aligned with the ‘narrow self-interest’ argument. When the respondents faced trade-offs with respect to spending cuts in policy areas in which they have vested interests, their support for increasing education spending drops notably. For instance, when an increase in education spending is linked to cuts in healthcare spending, support for higher spending on education decreases. Therefore, healthcare is just as essential as education or even more so. Pensions show a similar tendency, especially among older people. Although the impact of the trade-off linked to reduced unemployment benefits is less pronounced, it nevertheless has a role in diminishing support for higher spending on education.

In line with our theoretical expectations, we find that these trade-off effects are more pronounced among key stakeholder groups. For instance, we find that labour-market positioning and income are important factors in shaping preferences when facing the trade-off linked to higher spending on education. Unemployment is a prominent trade-off for new graduates entering the job market, while pensions are essential for retirees and for those retiring soon.

Unlike what some studies suggest, the impact of ideology on public attitudes appears tenuous at best when the trade-offs are introduced. Our analysis shows that both left and right-wing people responded similarly to the trade-offs that were presented. Accordingly, left-wing people seem to have similar narrow self-interests as the right-wing people, when the education spending increase potentially diminishes spending in the welfare areas in which they have their vested interests. Income level, however, appears to be a significant determinant in shaping preferences. Respondents with higher incomes were more receptive to expanding education spending even in the presence of experimental treatment, while those with lower incomes prioritized healthcare and unemployment benefits over education. The five countries where we conducted our original survey share the challenge of relatively smaller welfare budgets than those of higher-income countries. This may bring about greater sensitivity of citizens to trade-offs compared to those in higher-income countries.

We discuss the implications of these findings for social policy scholars and practitioners. We conclude that trade-offs regarding welfare policies may determine where priorities should be placed, and these priorities would be contingent upon material interests relevant to specific stakeholder groups. When making budget decisions, it is important to ensure that more (less) money for education does not obviously come at the expense of other major social policies. Public opposition could result from failing to strike a balance between these conflicting interests, making the issue of education spending more divisive across stakeholder lines rather than across ideological positioning.

We also put forward that researchers and governments may need to go beyond traditional surveys and incorporate experimental design in surveys to assess public attitudes on specific policy areas, particularly against the backdrop of welfare recalibration. Experiments can isolate the effects of a trade-off (e.g., education versus health) by randomly presenting people with different scenarios because the trade-off itself shapes preferences, not just pre-existing opinions (i.e. when the respondent answers a simple survey question). Forced with a choice based on a realistic scenario, policymakers can better gauge latent preferences. Experimental techniques support the control of factors that might affect people’s preferences like income, educational level, age or ideological leaning. This ensures that any preference change is due to the trade-off presented, not those background factors. Using control factors and categorizing respondents based on stakeholder groups who are differently affected by public spending in distinct policy areas may help politicians test different framings to see how they impact support and how to best communicate policy choices to the public and specific constituencies.

---

Reference

Özel, Isik D., Salvador Parrado, and Kerem Yildirim. 2025. “When Trade-Offs Touch Self-Interests: Attitudes on Education Spending in a Cross-Country Analysis.” Journal of Social Policy: 1–20. DOI: 10.1017/S0047279425100883.

About the authors

Isik D. Özel is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain.

Salvador Parrado is Professor of Political Science at Universidad Nacional de Educación a
Distancia, Madrid, Spain.

Kerem Yildirim is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey.