This paper explores strategies and rationalities of local authorities when handling non-choosers, e.g. parents who fail or don’t make a school choice for the sake of their child. As such we aim to contribute to research on school choice and the role of local authorities in constructing competition (e.g., Karlsson, 2024). Within our ongoing research project on the local organization of school allocation (funded by the Swedish Research Council), we explore how the school choice reform is implemented in Swedish municipalities and the everyday struggle between neoliberal ideas of private choice and the lingering ideas of the comprehensive education system as a public good. We argue that the practical organization of school allocation involves the issue of balancing private and public goods. This struggle entails everyday ethical, political, as well as practical matters that are related to the role and discretion of civil servants (Brodkin, 2020). While there is a vast literature on school choice in a European context, less research has focused on how local authorities organize, manage, and construct competition in relation to education (exceptions are e.g., Dabisch, 2022; Sjögren, 2024). Within our project, we have mapped and identified four distinct ways in which the 290 Swedish local municipalities organize school allocation for 6-year-olds. In this presentation, we use data from municipalities that expect parental activity through different versions of ‘mandatory’ school choice. Among these 127 municipalities, 48 % were found to fill remaining spots with the ‘non-choosers’ following the allocation of those who expressed their preferences through school choice, while 52 % were found to place children of ‘non-choosers’ in the school closest or near the home. To explore the rationalities of these differences, we interviewed civil servants in 16 of the municipalities with different policies towards ‘non-choosers’. The 16 municipalities represent a broad range pertaining to demographic characteristics. We analyze the rationalities of municipalities’ management of non-choice with the help of Simmel’s work (2008[1903]: 977) on competition as “one of the decisive traits in modern life”, and recent conceptual development of competition as a social construct (Arora-Jonsson et al. 2020). Key is that competition is seen as having four constituent elements: actors, their relationship, senses of scarcity, and a desire for something. When one or more of these elements is not in place, competition becomes diffuse. This framework is instructive for theorizing how and with what rationalities competition is constructed in certain ways in different municipalities.

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