Core Voters or Swing Voters? The Distributive Politics of Higher Education Spending

This paper proposes several improvements to the literature on how political parties target distributive benefits to core and swing voters for electoral gain. I propose a conceptual redefinition of core and swing voters to extend their applicability to the analysis of multi-party systems. Instead of using voting data as is common in the literature, I propose to identify swing-voters by using survey data from the European Election Studies to identify the number of parties included in an individual's consideration set. This is the subset of parties that an individual reasonably considers when choosing to vote. Instead of using geographical expenditures as a measure of targeted expenditure I propose to look at programmatic expenditures that are biased in their consumption towards certain socio-economic groups. If such socio-economic groups are over-represented amongst a party's core or swing voters, then parties can use such expenditures to target resources towards them. I test this theory for the case of higher education expenditures in fourteen European countries. Children of higher educated parents are significantly more likely to enrol in university than children of parents with less education. Consequently, more educated parents prefer higher per student expenditures on tertiary education. I find evidence that parties spend more on higher education when a large share of their swing voters is highly educated. I find little support for the core voter hypothesis.