People’s perceptions of the fairness of private expenditure on education: A comparison of Japan and Taiwan

• In Event: Large-Scale Comparative Analysis of Teaching and Learning in East Asia

Proposal

Introduction
Privatization of education is ubiquitous across the globe. Education reforms in many countries indeed attempted to demolish centralized education systems and increased emphasis on parental choice and competition between schools, which led to quasi-markets in education services (Whitty & Power, 2000). Particularly, the growth of the private tutoring industry in East Asia attracted scholars’ attention. However, despite the globally growing presence of privatization, the number of studies on public opinion on privatization generally has been scarce (Legge & Rainey, 2003), and people’s perceptions of the privatization of education in East Asia is understudied.
Hence, to fill a gap in the literature, this study examines how people’s perceptions of the privatization of education are shaped by analyzing the Japanese and Taiwanese data from International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) Social Inequality 2019. This study will contribute to enriching the debate on the privatization of education in the field of comparative and international education by offering insight into how people perceive the privatization of education in societies where the education system is exposed to marketization. Furthermore, although this study may not be directly connected to CIES 2024 themes, studying public opinion will facilitate us to see the relationship between power and people’s voice by allowing us to compare public opinion to actual policy implementation related to the privatization of education.

Literature Review
Durant and Legge (2001) suggest that utilitarianism shapes public opinion. Providing political reform as an example, the authors argue that citizens are placed differently by their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. Citizens form the stance on the policy to either benefit from it or to avoid the disadvantage deriving from a policy. Due to the different positionality, citizens evaluate a policy differently. Therefore, in the context of the privatization of education, citizens may perceive it differently based on their socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, as it affects them differently because of sociodemographic differences.
Furthermore, although public opinion on the privatization of education has not been extensively studied, using the ISSP data, Mehrtens (2004) analyzes the relationship between the welfare type of states and public opinion on welfare programs. Mehrtens (2004) argues that the welfare type of state which is often correlated with its efforts on providing welfare programs shapes people’s preference for welfare programs. Hence, the state's welfare efforts play an important role in determining public opinion on welfare programs including education.
Likewise, neoliberalism is a driving force for the privatization of education as neoliberalism promotes the marketization of education (Doherty & Dooley, 2017). A shift of responsibility from the government to an individual is a foundational element of neoliberalism that leads to the privatization of education. Hence, in this study, utilitarianism, welfare efforts, and neoliberalism are considered as fundamental elements that are attributable to people’s perception of the fairness of private expenditure on education.

Research questions
The research questions of this study are the following.
1. To what extent do sociodemographic characteristics determine people’s perception of fairness of private expenditure on education?
2. To what extent do people’s beliefs on the role of the government and the government’s success in reducing the income gap shape their perception of fairness of private expenditure on education?


Data and Methodology
The data of this study derives from ISSP Social Inequality 2019 and it was collected with multistage sampling. The ISSP Social Inequality covers diverse issues related to social inequality such as social policy and redistribution, and market inequality in social services. This study analyzes the data from Japan and Taiwan as a comparative analysis. Japan and Taiwan are selected as these are the only two East Asian societies that participated in the ISSP Social Inequality 2019 and two societies have been exposed to the privatization of education coupled with the growth of the private tutoring industry (Dawson, 2010; Zhan, 2014).
Multinomial logistic regression is used for this study as the outcome variable, the perception of fairness of private expenditure on education contains three categories. As shown in Figure A1, the outcome variable comes from a questionnaire item asking, “Is it just or unjust -right or wrong- that people with higher income can buy better education for their children than people with lower income?” The answer options are categorized into the following, “Unjust”, “Neither just nor unjust”, and “Just” which are respectively coded as 3, 2, and 1.
Table A1 shows a list of independent variables with categories and coding. The variables, sex, age, education, social class, location, religion, and income security are considered as variables related to socioeconomic and demographic characteristics which correspond to research question 1.
The variables “Responsibility” and “Government’s success in reducing the income gap” are the main predictor variables for research question 2 since these variables are respectively related to neoliberalism and the state’s welfare efforts. Figures A4 and A4 indicate questionnaire items of responsibility and the government’s success in reducing the gap variables.

Findings from the previous study
The current study is built on a previous study that examines the same outcome variable but does not include an independent variable on welfare efforts. This section briefly summarizes the findings from the previous study. Table A5 and A6 represent multinomial regression analysis of people’s perceptions of the fairness of private expenditure on education in Japan and Taiwan. The Tables suggest that some sociodemographic characteristics are significant predictors of people’s perception of fairness of private expenditure on education. However, contrary to the utilitarianism theory, social class is not a statistically significant predictor in Japan and Taiwan. However, the opinion on the government’s responsibility is a significant predictor in both two societies. When an individual thinks the government should be responsible for reducing the income gap, a person is likely to believe buying better education is unjust.

Author

• Hinako Miyazaki, Teachers College, Columbia University