School Ownership and Government Accountability

This study examines the impact of the marketization of the educational sector on citizens’ voting behavior, particularly in response to increased accessibility to education. While it is rational for constituents to reward politicians for investing in public schools it is less clear if politicians also gain support when publicly funded but private entities does the same. Focusing on Sweden, where markatization of education has been far-reaching, the study investigates local electoral shift following the establishment of both new public and non-public schools. By merging comprehensive register data on Swedish schools with electoral data at the precinct level, I am able to study the effect on a neighborhood level and exploit within municipality variation in voting. Surprisingly, in contrast to standard accountability theory constituents seem to neither reward the incumbent politicians for new public schools nor for new non-puublic ones.