Educational Privatization in Advanced Democracies

• In Event: Looking Backward to See Beyond: Recent Developments in the Study of Worldwide Trends in Educational Reform

Abstract

The extent to which political parties have clashed over educational privatization in recent decades varies substantially across advanced democracies, despite similar trends in the underlying social demand (or resistance) to more diversified educational structures. This paper has a dual objective, to answer the question of why educational privatization is more contentious in some contexts than others, and to develop a framework for medium-n comparison of reform pathways.

This paper draws on a political economy framework to argue that the strategic incentives for parties and other actors to politicize education follow the timing of incorporation of private actors in the state and the extent of electoral fragmentation. To do so, it draws on three linked original datasets combined with long-standing individual-level electoral data. The first dataset involves a detailed compilation of policy reforms tracking changes in school choice and public-private involvement over the last 70 years in twenty long-standing democracies. The second involves an original dataset of education-related content in party manifestos, in these same countries. The final dataset involves coding the strength and positions of union and church actors in the education field. Using these three datasets, the paper examines when and where privatization is rhetorically divisive as it related to different educational structures and interest group alignments.

This paper demonstrates that both political attention and reforms to privatization in European education systems occurred in two waves. A first post-war movement built on ongoing religious “school wars” over education, involving conflict with churches, teachers, and post-war political parties in ways that continued the pre-war paths to secularization (Ansell & Lindvall 2013). Accommodation of private actors followed a U-shaped path: where religious actors were weak or non-existent (as in Scandinavia) there was little privatization, where they were dominant (as in Ireland and parts of Southern Europe) they monopolized the public system. Where they had a more intermediate role vis-à-vis liberal or other religious forces, conflict ensued (France, Belgium, pre-war Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand).

A second wave of political debates over privatization emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, largely in the countries that had been most successful at the development early centralized and secularization of educational structures. Early political “wins” for liberal or social democrats in terms of entrenching large public sector coalitions in periods of educational expansion, created much stronger incentives for the political right to mobilize on educational privatization in the post-1980s period. In this second wave, privatization moved from primarily focused on religion to class-based issues, with middle-class voters playing a central role.

Through this analysis, the paper shows that the early extension of political resources to non-public actors in the post-war period often limited educational polarization in the more contemporary period, mobilizing voters and interest groups in varied ways. In so doing, it reflects on using a medium-N strategy for analyzing educational reform, comparing the insights gained from this work to those using large-n quantitative analysis and intensive case-based research.

Authors

• Jane R. Gingrich, University of Oxford

• Anja Giudici, Newcastle University