WOPSI - The World Politics of Social Investment

Abstract

This paper is background paper for collaborative research project the World Politics of Social Investment (WoPSI). The WoPSI project is aimed at studying politics of social investment across 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 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 politics (political ideas and discourses, political cleavages and conflicts, political coalitions) surrounding agenda setting and adoption of social investment strategies, policies, and reforms. The aim of this background paper is to situate our project in 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 politics of social investment reform in all democracies around world. The background paper also defines key concepts of our approach. This background paper is aimed at providing interested scholars and potential project team members with a substantial idea of motivation of our project, as well as theoretical and empirical perspective we adopt. It should also allow readers to situate themselves relative to framework we develop in this project, in order to evaluate if they would like to join this collective enterprise.