Session Information
23 SES 10 A, Market Ideas and Practices II
Paper Session
Contribution
In many countries public and private schools are treated differently concerning public funding. Public schools are publicly funded and private schools require private funds. In such settings choice is not entirely free but depends on the financial means of parents. Additionally many countries do not even have choice among public schools; catchment areas define which school pupils will have to attend. Choice is therefore a question whether parents have the financial means to afford to live in areas where schools are (supposedly) better. Although the degree of school choice within a country does often not vary much over time and therefore differences between countries are constant and have long traditions, this does not mean that they are undisputed in educational policy making. In the country we are looking at in our paper – Switzerland- which has a longstanding tradition of a very low level of school choice (no choice among public schools and no public funding for private schools), demands for more choice are regularly debated and come up from time to time in popular votes. The most recent case has been a popular referendum in one Canton, where the people had to vote whether private schools should get the same public funding as public schools (a voucher model). The vote resulted in a massive downturn of the initiative with almost three quarters of the voters refusing vouchers for more school choice. This is the background for our own research. In a representative survey amongst 2’000 Swiss voters we have asked people whether a) they would be in favor of vouchers for private schools and b) whether they would be in favor of free choice among public schools. The first question was almost identical to the real vote in the aforementioned Canton and the result would have also been almost identical in our survey as in the real vote, whereas the question on free choice among public schools (which has never been put forward in a real vote) would find a large majority amongst the surveyed people. Our interest however, is to learn more about the characteristics of the people that are in favor of more school choice and those who are against it, in order to learn more about the motives for and against school choice.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Andersen, S.C. 2008 Private Schools and the Parents that Choose Them: Empirical Evidence from the Danish School Voucher System. Scandinavian Political Studies 31, 44–68. Belfield, C.R. 2003 Political Preferences And The Privatization Of Education: Evidence From The UK. Education Economics 11, 155–168. Bonoli, G., Häusermann, S. 2009 Who wants what from the welfare state? Socio-structural cleavages in distributional politics: evidence from Swiss referendum votes. European Societies 11, 211–232. Catterall, J.S., Chapleau, R. 2003 Voting on Vouchers: A Socio-political Analysis of California Proposi-tion 38, Fall 2000. Journal of Education Finance 29, 25–47. Cohen-Zada, D., Justman, M. 2003 The political economy of school choice: linking theory and evidence. Journal of Urban Economics 54, 277–308. Hanushek, E.A., Kain, J.F., Rivkin, S.G., Branch, G.F. 2007 Charter school quality and parental decision making with school choice. Journal of Public Economics 91, 823–848. Merzyn, W., Ursprung, H.W. 2005 Voter support for privatizing education: evidence on self-interest and ideology. European Journal of Political Economy 21, 33–58.
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