This article looks at the financial and economic crisis 2008–10 in 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development states and seeks to investigate explanatory paths for the subsidization of further education within short-time work programmes. Several hypotheses are put to the test: first, a classical partisan difference argument; second, a varieties of capitalism approach proposing a successful joint rallying of employers and employees for subsidization in coordinated market economies; and, lastly, the merged hypothesis that right-wing parties in a coordinated economic context might subsidize feeling the pressure to overcompensate an ‘issue ownership’ of left parties in the field of employee-friendly policies. We identify four explanatory paths: coordinated economies in the sample subsidized when they were economically closed or highly indebted. The results also support our combined hypothesis, that New Zealand – a left-governed liberal market economy – and right-governed coordinated market economies of the non-Scandinavian type subsidized.
