This chapter studies the role of public opinion in the politics of education reforms in Spain between 2011 and early 2018. The influence of public opinion in education reforms varied, depending on how salient and coherent public opinion was. Public opinion sent a loud and clear signal in opposition to the government´s cuts in public education spending. Although heavily constrained by the major financial and economic crisis, the government corrected some of its budget cuts in the run-up to the 2015 elections and especially once it had lost its parliamentary majority in the same elections. On aspects related to the structure and governance of the education system, salience was high, but public opinion was much more divided (loud but noisy politics). In this case, the conservative government was clearly appealing to its core constituencies and relied on its parliamentary majority to enact its major education reform in 2013. In this political environment, the public gave little attention to policy reforms in early childhood education and care and vocational education and training. Quiet politics lent greater influence to the government’s budgetary concerns and to organized interests in the development and implementation of reforms in these sectors.

This chapter studies the role of public opinion in the politics of education reforms in England from 2010 until early 2018. We find the influence of public opinion to vary depending on the salience and coherence of public opinion. When issues were highly salient and public opinion was coherent (loud politics), the government appealed to public opinion. It expanded free access to childcare and partly corrected its original attempts to cut public spending on schools and increase tuition fees for higher education. With high salience on the issue but conflicting preferences across partisan constituencies (loud but noisy politics), the government pushed through its reform agenda, which targeted the preferences of its core constituencies. It was able to continue to do this provided it possessed sufficient strength in parliament (in the case of its attempt to expand selective grammar schools) and as long as public opinion remained sufficiently split between supporters and opponents of the government (in the case of tuition fees). When salience was low, quiet politics predominated. Several reform issues related to the governance of the education system failed to capture much public attention, which gave interest groups an opportunity to insert their preferences into the decision-making process.

The concluding chapter summarizes the main findings from the case studies and the preceding quantitative analysis. Broadly speaking, we find strong support for the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2. We also identify some patterns, i.e. school politics usually follow the logic of “loud but noisy politics.” In the other educational sectors (early childhood education and vocational education and higher education), it depends much more on the particular issue and country context whether an issue falls into the domains of quiet, loud, or loud but noisy politics. We also discuss several implications of our findings. For instance, we find that by and large, middle-class parents have a strong influence on the politics of education reform. Furthermore, even if they desire to influence public opinion in their preferred ways, political parties and interest groups have little success in actually achieving this. We close by inviting scholars to further explore the usability of our framework for other policy areas besides education.

This chapter studies the role of public opinion in the politics of education reforms in Sweden during 2006–2018. The chapter uses process tracing (based on primary and secondary sources as well as sixteen interviews with important stakeholders in the education system) to analyze what role public opinion has played in education reforms, from early childhood education to higher education. We find that the influence of public opinion varied depending on the salience and coherence of public opinion on the respective issues. The theoretical framework developed in Chapter 2, therefore, is confirmed. When issues were salient and the general public’s opinion coherent, public opinion had an important impact on policy-makers (e.g. in the cases of the 90-day youth employment guarantee or when raising teachers’ salaries). When issues were salient but attitudes conflicting (as in the cases of the prominent GY2011 school governance reform or in the “profits through the welfare state” debate), public opinion was important to bring the topic on the agenda, but the policy output depended solely on the respective parties in office. Finally, when salience was low, public opinion was negligible and interest groups dominated. The Swedish case study therefore offers detailed qualitative evidence for our theoretical model.

This chapter is concerned with explaining which role regulatory networks and policy communities play in EU policy-making today. Specifically, it seeks to provide working definitions for the concepts of ‘regulatory networks’ and ‘policy communities’. These concepts developed to reflect how networked governance has become a key aspect of today’s politics alongside hierarchical government structures. Thus, networks and communities serve to highlight how hybrid and flexible policy actors are operating along formal/informal and public/private dimensions, as well as across different levels of governance. While valuable as analytical devices to describe the plethora of atypical governance arrangements, how useful are they when we endeavour to explain and understand governance and politics today? The concepts are used extensively (and often interchangeably) in both the scholarly and policy literatures. By providing some more content to the terms, we can make them do more of the analytical work in understanding the range of relevant actors and their modes of interaction.

Who is in charge of the EU? Who controls what happens? What is the balance of power among EU institutional actors? Scholars have long disagreed, divided over which actors exercise what kind of power. As European integration has deepened over time, with all EU actors increasingly empowered in different ways, scholarly debates evolved, but the principal divisions remained. Some scholars contended that intergovernmental actors in the Council and later the European Council were in charge. Others insisted that supranational actors in a range of EU-level administrations and agencies exercised control. While yet others saw the EP as a growing force in EU decision-making.1

Continuing European integration, and more broadly global economic integration, has exposed the increasing discrepancy between nationally grounded tax policy and transnational economic affairs. Economic, political and cultural integration creates competitive pressures that challenge the fiscal and political sustainability of national policies, creating winners and losers (Genschel and Schwarz, 2011). National tax policy, in a transnational context, has significant distributional implications, both intranationally and internationally. Inside the EU, the highly uneven fiscal and political effects of integration in areas such as budget policy (see Chapter 6), monetary policy (see Chapter 9) and trade policy (see Chapter 14) are clearly visible.

Although the financial and economic crisis have ushered in a decade of lasting damage to the European economy, the political consequences have also been severe. Conflict among member states has threatened the progress of European integration, while polarisation and unrest have unsettled domestic politics in a host of European countries. The crisis has brought into question the ability of the single market to weather the pressures of the past decade as national governments have sought to address the slow economic growth and recovery by instituting a variety of protectionist measures to stimulate their economies. While such measures can shore up key industries, protect jobs and maintain a strategic international advantage in the wake of the financial crash, it puts the viability and effectiveness of the single market at risk.

‘Take back control’: in the lead up to a June 2016 plebiscite on whether to remain in or leave the EU, this was the rallying cry that framed the predominant narrative on the pro-Brexit side. Whatever might explain the determinants of individual voter choice in the eventual decision of the British electorate to leave by a majority of 52 per cent to 48 per cent, public debate during the campaign crystallised around the proposition that the UK should reclaim its sovereignty. The content of this cry for sovereignty was not empty. It was understood to mean the return of powers to the UK government for unilateral decision-making – powers that had been previously ceded to the EU, even though UK representatives are integral to EU decision-making processes. While the supposed material advantages of greater sovereignty outside the EU were emphasised, including the ability for the UK to adopt a more sustainable migration regime and to strike its own trade deals, a more principled case for national self-government undergirded the case to leave the EU. Reviewing the final pre-plebiscite statements of prominent publications and political figures who advocated a vote to leave the EU is telling in this regard. The editorial of a weekly conservative magazine, The Spectator, referred to ‘the EU’s fundamental lack of democracy’, an EP that ‘represents many nations, but with no democratic legitimacy’ and ‘the unelected President of the European Commission’ for whom ‘even the notion of democratic consent’ seems a distant concern. The article concludes: ‘To pass up the chance to stop our laws being overridden by Luxembourg and our democracy eroded by Brussels would be a derogation of duty … democracy matters. Let’s vote to defend it’ (The Spectator, 2016). Boris Johnson, a prominent Conservative politician who was a leading voice in the leave campaign, wrote in his broadsheet op-ed: ‘If Britain votes to Remain in the EU, then we continue to be subject to an increasingly anti-democratic system’; ‘we believe in democracy … and we are mad to throw it away’ (Johnson, 2016).