The Lessons Private Schools Teach: Using a Field Experiment to Understand the Effects of Private Services on Political Behavior

• Author: Emmerich Davies
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221115178
• Published date: 01 May 2023
• Date: 01 May 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(6) 824–861

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221115178

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The Lessons Private

Schools Teach: Using a

Field Experiment to

Understand the Effects of

Private Services on

Political Behavior

Emmerich Davies

1



Abstract

Government services act as important sites of political socialization. Through

interactions with the state individuals learn lessons about their value as

citizens, form preferences over government services, and understand the

value of political participation. What happens when the private sector re-

places government provision of basic services? I explore this question in the

context of a randomized private school voucher experiment in India. Based on

an original household survey of 1200 households, and semi-structured in-

terviews conducted 5 years after the voucher lottery, I f‌ind that voucher

winning households hold stronger market-oriented beliefs. However,

voucher winning households show little difference in political participation on

most measures of political participation. I argue that these results are driven

by a greater comfort with private providers as permanent economic actors.

This suggests exposure to different economic actors, in the form of private

schools, have the potential to change political preferences.

1

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Emmerich Davies, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 6 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA

02138, U.S.A.

Email: emmerich_davies_escobar@gse.harvard.edu

Keywords

political economy, politics of growth/development, education politics and

policy, South Asian politics, service provision

Government services have been found to act as important sites of political

socialization. Through interactions with institutions and functionaries of the

state, individuals learn important lessons about their worth as citizens and the

functioning of democracy, form preferences over government services, and

understand the value of political participation. At the same time, private actors

are providing a greater number of basic services across the developing world

(Cammett & MacLean, 2011). What happens when governments no longer

provide basic services and are replaced by private actors? Do private actors

break the link to this political socialization process? And does exit from state-

provided services shape political preferences in politically consequential

ways? Scholars have feared that as states cease to provide services and private

actors emerge to f‌ill the vacuum, citizens will become politically ambivalent

as they no longer require the state to provide services (Hirschman, 1970;

Lerman, 2019).

I explore state exit in India, where citizens have increasingly turned to

private organizations for basic services. This paper takes the case of education,

where over 40% of households send their children to private schools (ASER,

2019), and asks what happens to political attitudes and behaviors when

citizens exit state services for the private sector. I argue that state exit can have

two types of effects on politics: on how citizens participate in politics as a

result of different material and social positions, and on how citizens interpret

politics as a result of different experiences (Pierson, 1993). Despite the

importance of these questions, making conclusive causal claims is diff‌icult as

the growth of private services tends to be historically contingent and highly

endogenous to political and economic variables. To overcome these problems,

I leverage a randomized private school voucher program and provide causal

evidence on the effects of private services on political socialization. I f‌ind that

access to private services does not depoliticize citizens. Instead, they shape

economic preferences by making citizens more comfortable with a greater role

for the private sector in service provision.

Specif‌ically, I leverage a randomized school voucher lottery to understand

the political consequences of state exit. In 2008, households across f‌ive

districts of Andhra Pradesh, a large state in South India, were offered the

opportunity to enter a private school voucher lottery, and lottery winners could

send their child to a private elementary school for 4 years. I returned to these

households 5 years later and employed a mixed methods approach, including

an original survey of 1202 households that entered the lottery, and 30 semi-

Davies 825

structured interviews with program participants and education bureaucrats in

the state to test the effects of private services on political outcomes. I f‌ind that

households that sent their children to private schools become more com-

fortable with paying out of pocket for other services that are currently pro-

vided by the government, which I take as evidence of increasing comfort with

the private sector. Political participation —measured either by voting, a

number of more costly partisan actions such as canvassing for a political party,

or non-partisan local participation —shows few differences between treat-

ment and control groups on most measures. I argue that while exit from

government services has an effect on mass publics, it is on economic pref-

erences, and not political behavior.

I explore three potential mechanisms for what could be driving results:

better objective or subjective quality of private schools, the breaking of ties

between citizens who attend private schools and the Indian bureaucracy, and

greater comfort with the private sector as a result of increasing ties to the

private sector. Evidence suggests that the results are driven by greater comfort

with the private sector, which I call “legibility”. Voucher winners report that

they came to understand the functioning of the private sector through access to

private schools, and that they had greater faith in the private sector continuing

to operate in low-income communities. I f‌ind no evidence for private schools

being of better quality than government schools or that moving children to

private schools severed ties between citizens and the Indian bureaucracy.

Private schools were of equivalent quality as government schools, and re-

spondents in the treatment group reported similar levels of contact with

government bureaucrats even after exiting to the private sector.

These f‌indings are important not only for what they tell us about the Indian

case, but what they reveal about service provision more generally. While

social science has traditionally assumed that the state is the primary provider

of basic services (Post et al., 2018), the private sector is increasingly an

important service provider both in the U.S. (Morgan & Campbell., 2011), and

in low- and middle-income countries (Cammett & MacLean, 2011). This

paper adds to a growing body of work that suggests we should take the

political effects of religious (Clark, 2004;Thachil, 2011,2014b), non-

governmental organizations (Boulding, 2014;Bratton, 1989), and private

organizations seriously (Lerman, 2019). Much of this work has focused on the

strategic use of service provision by political parties to win votes (Cammett &

Issar, 2010;Clark, 2004;Thachil, 2014a,2014b). Here I argue and show that

even private organizations without explicit political goals have important

political effects by changing a recipient’s perceptions of their social world

(Lerman, 2019).

The case of education in low- and middle-income countries also merits

special attention. I provide causal evidence of the effects of schools on mass

publics. The literature on the effects of education in political science has

826 Comparative Political Studies 56(6)