(iPoster) “Reformism” in Education and the Liberal and Neoliberal Models of Governance

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory 3 (Critical); Education Politics and Policy; & Political Science Education
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Education Politics and Policy

Abstract

Since the post-World War II era, education enrollments expanded worldwide and country governments engaged in an unending series of reforms to improve access to and quality of their public schooling (Chabbott 2003). In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal principles generated greater reform efforts in the privatization and decentralization of education (Verger et al. 2016). In contrast to these periods during which reforms flourished, the past decade has seen a dramatic drop in the reporting of education reforms around the world (Bromley et al. 2023), as well as a stark rise in illiberalism and authoritarianism (Haggard and Kaufman 2021; Walder and Lust 2018). Building on the idea that belief in “reforms” is a key feature of liberal principles (Ikenberry 2018), our study examines to what extent liberal and neoliberal shifts and domestic political changes shape countries’ education reforms.

The political institutions in a society reflect the cultural model defining and legitimating the authority of assigned actors, means, and ends to be pursued through political action (Meyer et al. 1987). In other words, the political culture of society prescribes a framework for political action, including who can make decisions, what kind of decisions are to be made, and what are the patterns of activities that should be followed to achieve collective goals. In liberal and neoliberal models of governance, state actors assume greater authority to enact change and take on responsibility as a main stakeholder of education. As such, we would expect countries to report more education reforms in a world in which liberalism and neoliberalism are dominant. Specifically, we ask: (1) Do more liberal and neoliberal regimes (at national and global levels) engage in greater levels of reform activities?; (2) Are countries’ democratizing or autocratizing efforts associated with greater levels of reform activities?; and (3) Do more liberal and neoliberal regimes (at national and global levels) discuss liberal and neoliberal content in their reform discourse?

To measure the level of reform activities in education, we use the number of reforms reported by countries in a given year. The main source for reform data is the World Education Reform Database (WERD), a database of more than 10,000 reforms in over 200 countries spanning the period 1960-2018. We define “reform” as a state-led, formalized effort at intentional, systemic change, such as laws, policies, frameworks and other purposeful alterations to education systems (Bromley et al. 2024). To measure thematic content in reform discourse, we used an innovative methodological approach. We develop content indicators using the natural language processing method, word2vec (Mikolov et al. 2013), capturing each reform’s semantic similarity with several terms relevant to liberalism and neoliberalism. We use iterative principal factor analysis on these semantic indicators to create meaningful constructs. With these outcome variables, we conduct panel regression analysis with country-fixed effects.

To answer our first and third research questions, we use the following independent variables: (a) national-level of liberalism, using the Varieties of Democracy’s data on liberal democracy index (Coppedge et al. 2024), (b) global-level of liberalism measured by a global average of the liberal democracy index, (c) national-level neoliberalism, using the KOF index of economic globalization (Dreher 2006; Gygli et al. 2019), and (d) global-level of neoliberalism measured by a global average of the economic globalization index. To measure democratization or autocratization within a country, we utilize the Episodes of Regime Transformation dataset; a measure of changes in the V-Dem’s electoral democracy index to determine whether a country is experiencing a democratic or autocratic transition (Maerz et al. 2023).

Our findings demonstrate that higher levels of liberalism and neoliberalism at the world-level are significantly associated with a greater number of reform activities. We also find that changes in the direction of greater democracy result in an increase in the number of education reforms, but changes towards autocracy do not. Although reforms in education during autocratic transitions occur in certain cases, countries’ autocratizing efforts, on average across all reported cases, do not demonstrate a statistically significant relationship with the level of education reforms reported by countries. These findings bolster our argument of education reform as a feature of liberalism and neoliberalism, generating greater discourse around and attention to education. In a world in which the liberal international order is increasingly questioned and challenged, the amount and the nature of reforms emphasized in education are likely to change. Our work contributes to a growing body of literature investigating the consequences of growing contestations of a liberal world order.

Authors

• Marcia Yang, Stanford University

• Minju Choi, Berlin Social Science Center (WZB)

• Tom Nachtigal, Stanford