School Vouchers and the New Politics of the Welfare State

• 成果类型: Article; Proceedings Paper
• 署名作者: Klitgaard, Michael Baggesen
• 署名单位: University of Southern Denmark; University of Southern Denmark
• 刊物名称: GOVERNANCE-AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF POLICY ADMINISTRATION AND INSTITUTIONS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0952-1895
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0491.2008.00410.x
• 发表日期: 2008
• 关键词: PUBLIC-SECTOR; swedish; CHOICE; institutions; reforms; POLICY

摘要

School vouchers might seem a natural feature of the liberal welfare model of the U.S. and American society generally. However, for social democratic welfare states in Scandinavia, school vouchers would seem to be a contradiction. Nevertheless, school vouchers have faced severe resistance in the USA, and the program has so far not been adopted as a national educational reform, although sporadic and limited state-level developments can be observed. In sweden, however, the social democratic welfare state adopted a national, universal public voucher scheme in the early 1990s. The goal of this article is to explain this counter-theoretical empirical puzzle. It is argued that the varying output from political processes on school vouchers in the USA and Sweden is to be explained by the different ways in which political institutions affect political decision making in the two countries.