Federalist Education System: Politicians Worry Too Much About Reputation
Research
15.03.2023
ZEW Experiment on the Quality of Political Decisions
Why is the federalist structure of the German education system deficient? Researchers from ZEW Mannheim, the Ludwig Erhard ifo Research Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics in Fürth, the Technichal University of Munich and the ifo Institute in Munich investigate how political decision-making can be improved in an experiment with citizens and politicians. For this purpose, more than 10,000 people and all members of the state parliaments were asked about the quality of the education policy in their state. The study shows that the proposal to increase transparency of educational performance meets a high level of approval among parliamentarians from better-performing federal states, while it meets with little approval among parliamentarians from low-performing federal states.
“The results suggest that politicians reject the idea of more transparency for fear of a negative reputation,” notes cooperation partner Dr. Sebastian Blesse from the Ludwig Erhard ifo Research Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics in Fürth. Justus Nover, ZEW economist in the Research Unit “Corporate Taxation and Public Finance” and co-author of the study adds: “A high degree of transparency is necessary to be able to comprehensively map the success of political measures. However, this is hardly the case in Germany’s federalist educational system. Consequently, competition between the federal states for the best education policy approaches is prevented due to a lack of transparency.” Yet such competition could lead to better educational outcomes if successful measures were mutually adopted by the federal states. In practice, however, reforms in the interest of the common good are often neglected.
Misperceptions about educational success
For the study, the researchers interviewed both citizens and parliamentarians. Both groups have misperceptions about the actual performance of school students in their state. “Our experiment shows that providing transparent information on educational performance reduces citizens’ satisfaction with education policy in their own state when student performance is comparatively poor,” Nover explains. “Information on educational performance also increases support for regular cross-state comparative student tests as a transparency-enhancing measure.”
In the experiment, the participants were divided into treatment and control groups. Randomly, some respondents received information on comparative student test performances at the state level. The researchers examined whether this information influences participants’ responses and thus favours public welfare-oriented measures such as the implementation of regular student comparison tests at the state level to increase transparency.
