PreK Politics: Divergent Experiences & Crosscutting Political Consequences

• In Event: Intersectional Research on Class and Inequality

Abstract

subtitle: Natural & Quasi-experimental Evidence from Parents in New York State.

Flipping the expectation that public opinion drives democratic policymaking, I argue lived experience with current policy gives rise to citizens’ expectations and preferences about the government’s role in childcare. My original panel study leverages quasi-experimental allocation of limited Universal Public Preschool (“UPK”) seats in New York State for an appropriate empirical test of “policy feedback” theorized over time at the citizen-level. Building on prior work, I expect divergent experiences with this valuable and visible public benefit to change parents’ childcare attitudes over time, splitting preferences among citizens with similar stake in preschool policy.

Difference-in-differences analyses with complimentary natural and quasi-experimental samples drawn from my parents panel yield consistent causal evidence of substantial, cross-cutting, attitude change among parents: one semester of non-means tested public preschool generates expectations of greater government responsibility for childcare among parents whose children have a seat.

Views among peers who purchase private preschool for UPK-eligible children also adapt with life. Relatively well-resourced parents in this group are distinctly supportive of publicly-provided childcare options in September, but become markedly less so after months invested in individual solutions for their own. In expectation and in actuality, financial responsibility for childcare is a different matter. Parents with children in preschool — private and public programs similarly — become more likely over a semester to believe that paying for childcare is the government’s responsibility. As anticipated, the remaining set of eligible parents who use neither public nor private preschool are unmoved by the school calendar.

Affirming positive policy experiences can be politically meaningful in an age of polarization and government distrust, these results help bridge the policy feedback literature’s rich theoretical foundations with a newer generation of quantitative scholarship focused primarily on the ACA. Most importantly, my study reveals the American oddity of wholly-private responsibility for childcare to be a critical mechanism reproducing political, economic, and social inequalities along well-trodden lines of gender, class, and race in the United States.

Author

• Sophie Jacobson, Harvard University