Do Parties Matter for School Reform? Revisiting the Partisan Explanation for Redistributive Outcomes in Education

This paper analyses parties’ responsiveness to their electorates’ preferences towards institutions that contribute to the distribution of quality education (selectiveness of different schools; regulation of the teacher labour market) starting from the following puzzle: In 2007, both the main candidates for the French presidential elections pledged to allow every parent to choose a school for their children and justified this pledge with the broad popular support for such a measure. Why then was it eventually not transformed into a reform project that would generalise school choice as the logic of allocation of pupils to public schools? Does this indicate a lack of responsiveness of parties in government to their electorate on this issue? Such a result would run counter our knowledge of the strong link between partisan government and public spending on education. In this paper, I argue that the politics of distribution of education work slightly differently than the politics of redistribution. The politics of distribution involve creating or modifying institutions that affect actors’ (families, teachers, administrators) behaviour. Such institutional change is risky business for parties, as its socio-economic effects are uncertain and long term, while practical implications on individuals’ everyday life are immediate. With a comparison of policy processes that alter the distribution of students to schools in France, Britain, and Sweden from 1990-2010, the paper assesses to what extent two channels of the party-voter linkage compete: the constituencies’ economic interests that parties represent and general public opinion which includes the mobilization of other actors.