The history of the composition of government spending is both complex and fascinating. Although government priorities have changed over the past 150 years, social spending has been the biggest ‘winner’. In the late nineteenth century, public spending focussed on public administration, investment, debt service and the military. In the following decades until about 1960, such growth focussed on developing public services and social safety nets, taking advantage of falling military spending after the two world wars. The following sixty years saw mostly further increases in social expenditure, especially on pensions, health and long-term care. Public spending on ‘goods and services’ has always averaged nearly half of total expenditure. By contrast, social expenditure has grown from less than 10% a century ago to 55% in 2017. Education spending has been stable at about 10% of total spending in recent decades, after rising strongly in earlier years. The share of public investment has been falling steadily, from 20% in the late nineteenth century to only 7% in 2017.

This chapter analyzes attitudes and preferences toward education spending. Relying on representative survey data for eight European countries, it (1) studies what citizens want when it comes to education spending and (2) explores explanations for these preferences, i.e. the main latent political cleavages over education reform. The first part of the chapter sheds theoretical and empirical light on the question how salient is education expenditure compared to other (social) policy areas. Moreover, it explores how attitudes toward education spending relate to attitudes toward means to finance this spending (via taxation, debt, or retrenchment in other areas). The second part of the chapter studies preferences toward the distribution of spending on different sectors of the education system. The results show, among other things, that compared to other issues education is highly salient, particularly schools and vocational education and training. While public support drops considerably once increases in expenditure come at a price, there is an astonishingly high support for education-related taxes. The chapter reports evidence for several potential cleavages over education spending (e.g. along respondents’ income and educational backgrounds), the most consistent one being a partisan divide.