WOPSI - The World Politics of Social Investment

Abstract

This paper is the background paper for the collaborative research project "the World Politics of Social Investment (WoPSI)". The WoPSI project is aimed at studying the politics of social investment across the democratic world from a comparative perspective. The guiding research questions are descriptive as well as causal: How do social investment agendas and social investment policy reforms vary across democratic countries around the globe? How can we explain this diversity? Under what political conditions do social investment agendas and/or reforms develop? We are particularly interested in understanding the politics (political ideas and discourses, political cleavages and conflicts, political coalitions) surrounding the agenda setting and the adoption of social investment strategies, policies, and reforms. The aim of this background paper is to situate our project in the existing literature, to define our research questions and to develop a theoretical framework that is formulated in a sufficiently general way so that it applies to the politics of social investment reform in all democracies around the world. The background paper also defines the key concepts of our approach. This background paper is aimed at providing interested scholars and potential project team members with a substantial idea of the motivation of our project, as well as the theoretical and empirical perspective we adopt. It should also allow the readers to situate themselves relative to the framework we develop in this project, in order to evaluate if they would like to join this collective enterprise.

Keywords: social investment, politics of social investment, education policy, family policy, active labor market policy, childcare, welfare state, welfare state research