Location Decisions of Independent Schools in Sweden- Does ideology matter?

Abstract: The Swedish school voucher reform in 1992 gave rise to independent schools and free choice of school for students. Since 1997, local governments have the opportunity to utter their opinion regarding the establishment of an independent school. General known predictions forecast that parties on the left-wing on the political scale dislike outsourcing more than parties on the right-wing. This thesis aims to find causal effects of local political ideology on the location decisions of independent schools. A perspective that hasn’t been prioritised in previous studies of the school voucher reform. As empirical strategy, I use a difference-in- differences approach on the share of independent schools in each municipality before and after the reform of 1997. Data is on the municipality level and consists of 288 municipalities for the years 1993-2008. The results indicate that independent schools establish relatively less frequently in left-leaning municipalities, and the distinction to other municipalities increases after the reform. The difference in the share of independent schools is 2,16 percentage points more negative in left-leaning municipalities than in other municipalities after 1997.