Why Voters Veto Vouchers : Public Schools and Community-Specific Social Capital

This article offers an explanation for the failure of statewide voucher plans, which would entitle students to use public money to attend private schools, to be generally accepted by the public. I submit that public schools are in fact a local public good. The reason economists have failed to notice this is that they have looked exclusively at the educational activity of the schools. Education is actually a private good, being both rival in its consumption and excludable in its provision. Its only arguable publicness stems from the benefits that cannot be appropriated by the person educated, and these spillovers are probably best internalized by state and national subsidies to private education. The publicness of public schools accrues largely to the parents of school children and to other adult residents of the community. Having children in a local school enables voting adults to get to know one another better, which in turn reduces the transaction costs of providing other local public goods. The network of adult acquaintances within the municipality is community-specific social capital. It makes it easier for adult residents to round up others to oppose the ugly building proposed in their neighborhood or to lobby the city council to build a by-pass to alleviate local traffic congestion. This benefit cannot usually be obtained from private education because such schools have a geographically dispersed clientele who live in different political jurisdictions. Vouchers would disperse students from their communities and thereby lower the community-specific social capital of adult residents. Voters' implicit understanding of this effect causes them to reject voucher plans. This article's empirical evidence also offers an alternative explanation for the twentieth century's rise and decline of social capital, as documented by Robert Putnam. The 1960s peak of his social capital indicators coincides with the peak in the number of school-age children per household, and both have fallen since then