Explaining change and inertia in Swedish and French education: A tale of two corporatisms?

Abstract

Why do western welfare states differ so starkly when it comes to educational governance and, in particular, the degree of (de-)centralization? This article focuses on two such western European countries which demonstrate highly similar educational traditions, institutions and guiding principles – France and Sweden. The Swedish education system has evolved into one of the most decentralized in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), while France has preserved the main components of its centralized education system amid a broader international trend towards decentralization. Looking at secondary education governance in both countries, the author theorizes different forms of ‘educational corporatism’ and the resulting patterns of interactions of teacher unions as key educational actors. Characterized by ‘competitive corporatism’ within the centralized bureaucracy, the French education policy framework has enabled teachers unions to capture the policy-making apparatus and exploit their internal differences to stymie education reform and decentralization. Swedish teachers unions, by contrast, compensated for the decline of centralized corporatism by creating new institutions of ‘local teacher-dominated corporatism’, which altered the incentive structure for decentralization. The research question bears significance for contemporary education policy-making, as France's weak performance in international comparisons has been traced to excessive educational centralization, while critics of Swedish education link the weak performance of Swedish pupils to the perceived excessive decentralization of the education system.