Privatized Policy Feedback: How School Choice Organizations Influence Politics

• In Event: Privatizing Policy Feedback

Abstract

Many classic studies of policy feedback have focused on social welfare and re-distributional programs delivered by government. Fewer scholars have focused on the potential feedback effects of policies designed to shrink the size of the state through privatization, third-party governance, and other methods. While the political history of privatization policies (such as for retirement, health, and criminal justice policies) has been well told, there is less known about what happens after privatization, despite theoretically important reasons to consider whether those who are served by privatized public policies respond in unique ways from those served by other programs. These potential differences matter given the crucial gender and racial dimensions of many privatization policies. In the paper, I ask: Are individuals and groups transformed by participating in privatization schemes and, if so, how do those individuals and groups later influence the direction of the policy, if at all? My aim is to investigate this question by comparing two school choice education policies that can be loosely groups under the umbrella of privatization, yet which differ in important ways: charter school policy and homeschool policy. In particular, the paper focuses on the organizational ecology of each policy domain in the United States, and whether the differences in each privatized education policy regime relate to differences in interest group behavior. Relying on twenty years of group data scraped from the internet from 1998-2018, the findings suggest ways that privatized policy feedback can shape the politics of those directly and indirectly served by policy. As predicted by theory, homeschool organizations use distinct political strategies compared to charter school organizations as well as organizations representing traditional public school employees.

Author

• Heath Brown, City University of New York, Graduate Center and John Jay College