This chapter considers contributions from the political science literature to understanding the causes and consequences of cross-national diversity in training regimes across the most developed democracies. The recent surge of interest by political scientists in skills has developed as an offshoot of debates over distinctive varieties of capitalism. Although economists are mostly interested in the efficiency effects of different skill formation systems, and sociologists, often, in the effects of educational opportunities on social stratification, political scientists came to the topic of skills through an interest in understanding the political and institutional foundations of national political-economic systems associated with divergent political and distributive outcomes. In these debates, the skill systems that have attracted the most attention are those, such as the German one, that appear capable of reconciling high wages with high productivity via high skills and high value-added production (Streeck, 1991). In this chapter, therefore, we focus particular attention on Germany, while situating this case in the context of a broader comparative literature on the origins, operation, and future of distinctive skill regimes. The chapter is divided into three main sections. The first section briefly considers a range of arguments by political scientists on the implications of different, nationally specific models of skill formation. It presents an overview of the various typologies that have been devised to characterize cross-national differences in training systems, and it links these to recent claims about how vocational education and training systems fit into broader national political-economic models.
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