Timothy Hicks

Inequality, marketisation and the left: Schools policy in England and Sweden

It is argued in this article that the marketisation of schools policy has a tendency to produce twin effects: an increase in educational inequality, and an increase in general satisfaction with the schooling system. However, the effect on educational inequality is very much stronger where prevailing societal inequality is higher. The result is that cross-party political agreement on the desirability of such reforms is much more likely where societal inequality is lower (as the inequality effects are also lower). Counterintuitively, then, countries that are more egalitarian – and so typically thought of as being more left-wing – will have a higher likelihood of adopting marketisation than more unequal countries. Evidence is drawn from a paired comparison of English and Swedish schools policies from the 1980s to the present. Both the policy history and elite interviews lend considerable support for the theory in terms of both outcomes and mechanisms.

Inequality and Electoral Accountability: Class-Biased Economic Voting in Comparative Perspective

Do electorates hold governments accountable for the distribution of economic welfare? Building on the finding of “class-biased economic voting” in the United States, we examine how electorates in advanced democracies respond to alternative distributions of income gains and losses. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, we examine whether lower- and middle-income voters defend their distributive interests by punishing governments for concentrating income gains among the rich. We find no indication that non-rich voters punish rising inequality and substantial evidence that electorates positively reward the concentration of aggregate income growth at the top. Our results suggest that governments commonly face political incentives systematically skewed in favor of inegalitarian economic outcomes. At the same time, we find that the electorate’s tolerance of rising inequality has its limits: class biases in economic voting diminish as the income shares of the rich grow in magnitude.

Partisan Strategy and Path Dependence: The Post-War Emergence of Health Systems in the UK and Sweden

Why did a highly redistributive, nationalised health-care system emerge in the UK, where the Left was comparatively weak, while a more redistributively-neutral, cash-centric, insurance-based system was pursued in Sweden, where the Left was strong? I argue that the explanation is twofold. First, the weakness of the British Labour Party constrained it to pursue redistribution via health policy, while the Swedish Social Democrats were unconstrained in this way. Second, given the redistributive goals of the NHS, it became imperative for the Labour Party to construct a system that would be difficult for future Conservative governments to retrench. Thus, they created structures for the NHS that would persist. More generally, this formulation posits rational actors operating in the kinds of processes typically studied by historical institutionalists. The result is a tendency for a type of path dependence by design. Thus, the UK got the NHS because left-wing policy-makers were weak and feared the Conservatives, while no such fear existed in Sweden.