Abstract
Vouchers as tools of provision of social and individual subsidies are rather marked politically as they have been promoted by economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Despite their controversial political sense, vouchers have spread widely in the 2000 among the French local governments to provide individual subsidy. While in the USA the debate is strong between supporters and opponents of voucher systems, in France, the apparent neutrality of vouchers permitted them to spread at a local and regional scale without particular political tension. Our research, based on 45 qualitative interviews and on a wide source research within the local governments and private actors, showed that this silent spread is mainly due to the marketing and lobbying action of voucher companies that have done a lot to neutralize the vouchers and avoid all political debate on its their strong liberal roots.
Highlights
Vouchers are “instruments of public action” (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2004) with a paradoxical scientific reputation
Cultural vouchers can be considered as tools presenting a supply of services and providing freedom of choice. They are used in a way that is diametrically opposed to traditional cultural policy, which subsidies and supports the cultural actors. We find this idea in the arguments developed in the interview with E25, Vice-President in charge of Cultural Affairs in 1998, and with E36, President of the Cultural Commission of the Regional Council, when they discuss a political divide in the perception that politicians have of cultural vouchers
The various interviews conducted during this study enable us to compare the arguments used to explain the implementation of the various voucher systems by French local governments with those developed by Anglo-American researchers in the 1990s and 2000s and presented in our introduction
Summary
Vouchers are “instruments of public action” (Lascoumes and Le Gales, 2004) with a paradoxical scientific reputation. Considered neutral tools by American decisions makers, they have been applied to many other fields, starting with culture (Peacock, 1968), housing, food, and social aid (Colin, 2005) With this expansion, in the USA, of the spread of vouchers to other fields (and following several researchers Steuerle (2000, 2001), Salamon (2001), Greene (1998, 2001, 2011), and Sturgess and Bodroza (2011), our research method consists of isolating the six main arguments justifying the desire by a government to implement a voucher system, namely: promotion of free choice for a targeted public, social equity (to legitimize to tax payers the provision of an oriented social subsidy to a targeted population), the organization of tenders between providers of goods and services redeemable by vouchers, the replacement of an existing subsidy program, the restriction and capping of choice of beneficiaries and the desire to save public money while funding social policy. This tool crystallizes (Halpern et al, 2014) political and moral opinion and defines the target “public” of this social aid: this aid should be a “waste of public money” and those that receive it should not adopt a “the state can do everything for me” attitude, but rather be guided in their choice and be able to use the services of competing private providers overseen by the regulatory state
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