The Making of Social Democracy The Economic and Electoral Consequences of Norway’s 1936 School Reform; Kjell Salvanes (Norwegian School of Economics)

Abstract

Social democratic governments have profoundly shaped the Nordic countries gradual reforms in education, health care, redistribution, social insurance, labor market institutions over the 20th century. As an early stage of the building of welfare state institutions before the WWII, the Social Democratic governments used human capital policies as a building block to enable further redistributive reforms and to foster support for the reform agenda. The research question we ask in this paper is how the primary school reform in 1936 - first major reform undertaken by the Social Demographic government in Norway after coming into power – affected the electoral support for the program and shaped the income distribution and equality of opportunity. The reform extended the number of hours taught in school and was rolled out over more than a decade. What made it possible to carry out these reforms? We find the reform strongly affected income and post-mandatory education and had spillover effect on the next generation including an increase in cognitive ability. Importantly, the reform also had strong electoral consequences by strongly increasing the social demographic vote share in the next generations in affected municipality.

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