söndag
28sep2008
Baggesen on school vouchers in Sweden and US
28 sep 2008, kl 19:26
Klitgaard Michael, Baggesen. 2008. "School Vouchers and the New Politics of the Welfare State." Governance 21:479-498.
School vouchers might seem a natural featureof the liberal welfare model of the U.S. and American societygenerally. However, for social democratic welfare states inScandinavia, 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 educationalreform, although sporadic and limited state-level developments can beobserved. In Sweden, however, the social democratic welfare stateadopted a national, universal public voucher scheme in the early 1990s.The goal of this article is to explain this counter-theoreticalempirical puzzle. It is argued that the varying output from politicalprocesses on school vouchers in the USA and Sweden is to be explainedby the different ways in which political institutions affect politicaldecision making in the two countries.
School vouchers might seem a natural featureof the liberal welfare model of the U.S. and American societygenerally. However, for social democratic welfare states inScandinavia, 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 educationalreform, although sporadic and limited state-level developments can beobserved. In Sweden, however, the social democratic welfare stateadopted a national, universal public voucher scheme in the early 1990s.The goal of this article is to explain this counter-theoreticalempirical puzzle. It is argued that the varying output from politicalprocesses on school vouchers in the USA and Sweden is to be explainedby the different ways in which political institutions affect politicaldecision making in the two countries.
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