This chapter provides a review of the comparative literature on the politics of education with a focus on the politics of comprehensive school reforms. It summarizes the development of school systems in Norway and Germany during the postwar period of educational expansion. It then lays out the theoretical framework of the book. To this end, it introduces power resources theory and Rokkanian cleavage theory and discusses reflections on and expectations for education politics based on these perspectives. The chapter then summarizes the main argument and structure of the book. It ends with a note on the book’s history and a reflection on case selection and methodology.

In Chapter 3, the political playing fields of the postwar reform period in Norway and Germany are analyzed with a focus on the structural and organizational dimensions of cleavages. To shed light on the distribution of power resources, election results, government participation, financial resources, and membership numbers of the main actors are compared. Even though the Norwegian political left was somewhat more powerful, the differences in the distribution of power resources between the left and the right do not seem great enough to preclude a more similar political development in the two cases. The social base of the relevant political parties and teachers’ organizations is also examined. The analysis illustrates that many of the social groups organized by the Norwegian center parties, such as farmers, the rural population, and people with a strong Christian identity, including religious women, were found within the ranks of the CDU in Germany. Primary schoolteachers in Germany were divided into different organizations by denomination, while primary schoolteachers in Norway were more united. These findings are analyzed against the backdrop of the cleavage structures.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the development of Norway’s and Germany’s national school systems up to the 1950s, with the aim of setting the scene for the analysis of the postwar reform period. The narrative focuses on comprehensive school reforms, but also on other much-debated reforms of primary and secondary schooling. The chapter sheds light on how dominant cleavages came to expression in school politics over time and on how political playing fields developed, forming the school as an institution. It provides the necessary context to understand the conditions actors faced during the postwar reform period.

As discussed in Chapter 4, Norwegian social democrats and conservative German Christian democrats both managed to decisively shape the outcomes of comprehensive school reform attempts. Chapter 5 explores in more detail how they managed to convince large parts of the population to consent to their education policy agendas and how they successfully forged reform packages that appealed to different groups. To this end, the chapter analyzes five dimensions of education politics, which highly engaged at least some parts of the population: struggles over religion, centralization, language, anti-communism, and gender. It becomes clear that especially the center-periphery and rural-urban cleavages shaped Norwegian school politics during the postwar reform period. For the most part, this facilitated coalitions between the rural periphery and the Labor Party. In North Rhine–Westphalia, the state-church cleavage and the communist-socialist cleavage stood in the way of similar coalitions and instead stabilized the internal cross-interest coalition of the CDU.

Chapter 4 focuses on the ideological expressions of the class cleavage and thus on how actors grouped into camps along a political left-right axis, into protagonists, antagonists, and consenters to comprehensive school reforms. For the Norwegian case, it focuses on the youth school reform, including the failed abolition of grading. For the North Rhine–Westphalian case, the conflicts over the integrated comprehensive school and the cooperative school are discussed. The chapter demonstrates that political parties and teachers’ organizations were not united, but most of the time divided internally into different currents. The most palpable difference between the cases is that the political right was ideologically more united in Germany, while the political left was more united in Norway. Comparatively leftist arguments became hegemonic in Norway, but not in Germany. The religious and rural population consented to the reforms in Norway and opposed them in North Rhine–Westphalia. While Norwegian primary schoolteachers for the most part supported the reforms, some of the German primary schoolteachers’ organizations at best consented to or opposed comprehensive schooling.

In this concluding chapter, the contribution of the book is summarized: On the one hand, the comparative-historical case studies develop historically specific arguments for why Norwegian and German school politics evolved the way they did. On the other hand, they demonstrate that the Rokkanian approach is a fruitful starting point for comparative research on education politics. A final summary of the case studies and arguments is followed by a discussion of the general conclusions that can be drawn from them for comparative welfare and education regime research. The chapter also discusses some open questions that would merit further research. Finally, the current school-political situation in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany is analyzed briefly with a focus on how cleavages come to expression today and what this means for political coalition making.