ABSTRACT
Within comparative political analysis it is often presumed that liberal ideology strongly embeds the American nation and biases the political culture of the country against large government, towards personal freedom and individual choice. Scandinavians, on the other hand, are supposed to be more egalitarian and to hold collectivist values that translate into a positive vision of a dominating state that regulates significant parts of peoples’ lives (Steinmo and Watts 1995: 331; Rothstein 1998; Moe 2001: 15). From this perspective, two decades of institutional reforms in primary school education in the United States and Sweden pose an intriguing puzzle. For generations, both countries have operated universal public school systems according to which all citizens have the right to attain free and compulsory education. In the beginning of the 1980s, educational reform movements began, however, to suggest changes in this traditional form of primary education, and the issue of school choice in general and school vouchers in particular caused harsh conflicts in the following two decades (Klitgaard 2007b). Moving from a centralized way of governance to a market-like model, school vouchers represent a financial arrangement in which students are provided with a tuition certificate that can be used to attend public or private schools participating in the program (NCSPE 2003). Vouchers concentrate, so to speak, the idea of a new mix between public and private, or state and market, embraced by dominant public sector reform prescriptions produced by, for example, the OECD since the 1980s (Premfors 1998; Pollit and Bouckeart 2004). Vouchers guarantee education, but they do not determine where to go to school. This decision remains at the individual level, so that school choice is privatized, while the educational service can be provided by either public agencies or private entrepreneurs.
