Are more affluent parents treated more favourably by elementary school principals? Socioeconomic discrimination among local Swedish public officials

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that previous public administration and political science research might have missed important class-based inequalities by primarily focusing on ethnic discrimination among public officials and ignoring discrimination based on socioeconomic status (SES). A large-scale field experiment on the presence of SES discrimination among local Swedish public officials is presented. A total of 3430 Swedish elementary school principals were randomly contacted by parents with low- or high-SES professions and with Arabic- or Swedish-sounding names. The fictional parents were considering moving to the municipality and were interested in placing their children at the school. The results show clear signs of SES discrimination, particularly in regard to the more qualitative aspects of the replies. The findings also show interactions between SES and ethnicity, in which primarily the more formal aspects of the replies suggested that SES discrimination could be more prevalent against ethnic minority aliases than against other aliases.