Collective choice and individual action: Education policy and social mobility in England

Abstract

It is recognised that expressive preferences may play a major role in determining voting decisions because the low probability of being decisive in elections undermines standard instrumental reasoning. Expressive and instrumental preferences may deviate and in electoral settings it is more important to make policies expressively appealing. But policies are even more attractive if they can be made both expressively and instrumentally appealing. This paper studies education policy in England and proposes that the argument for increased state spending in school education is expressively appealing as it appears equitable, but the allocation of students to schools by catchment area is also instrumentally appealing to middle-class families. Allocation to schools by lottery may be expressively but not instrumentally appealing. Cutting education spending and dividing the proceeds between a tax cut to the affluent and a cash transfer to the poor may be instrumentally but not expressively appealing. The effort to provide instrumentally appealing policies with sufficient ethical content to satisfy expressive preferences may lead to inefficiency and distract attention from more serious ethical problems related to the policies. JEL Classification: D72; I2

Do Democracies Provide Better Education? Revisiting the Democracy–Human Capital Link

“…Likewise, Colclough and Al-Samarrai (2000) suggest that increased enrollment ratios in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia has often been achieved by lowering the "unit costs" of schooling. Studying education policy in current England, Jennings (2015) argues that also other education policies (such as banning private schools) may be supported by many voters on ethical (and sometimes instrumental) grounds, leading to "expressive voting" for such policies even if they induce sub-optimal education quality outcomes. Hence, there may even be negative effects of democracy on education quality due to the types of education policies that are electorally attractive.…”

Behavioral Political Economy: A Survey

“…32 See the "inefficient unanimity" discussed by Brennan & Lomasky (1984). A recent example is Jennings (2015), who shows how an expressive preference for upward social mobility leads to an inefficient outcome in the British education system.…”

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“…The studies relevant to social-economic issues, including finance (Quamruzzaman et al 2014;Kim et al 2022;Jennings 2015), human resource development, (Zeng and Zhang 2022;Zakharia et al 2022;Sano and Tomoda 2010;Soemartono 2014;Hardy and Liu 2022); intergenerational education mobility (Guo et al 2019), income inequality (Nakamura 2015), quality basic education (Mirasol et al 2021), equity (Shi et al 2022), democracy (Yirci and Karaköse 2010), public education policy (Sano and Tomoda 2010), elite education (Koon 2022).…”

“…children's health, the relationship between the policy of the free primary school and the number of births, infant risk, and mortality. In the study of education policy in England and state spending on school education (Jennings 2015), the authors found that the regional distribution of students is geared towards middle-class families and that the allocation to schools by lottery may be accurate but not necessarily desirable. In addition, efforts to create a policy with ethical content to satisfy the correct priorities may be ineffective and deviate from the requirements of the policy.…”