IET open seminar „Not noisy enough? Patterns and determinants of public opinion on education Policy in Estonia”

Public opinion and its role is an important aspect in all democratic societies. The more so in the case of education which is crucial for individual life courses. Therefore, linkages between public opinion, organized interests, and policy-makers have recently caught the attention of comparative welfare analysts (Busemeyer et al. 2020) by arguing that public opinion has to be lout but noisy to have an important role in policy-making. However, we know almost nothing about politics in education in Eastern-European countries. This study aims to contribute to the fulfilment of this gap by analysing educational preferences and their potential role in policy-making in Estonia. There are several aspects that makes the politics of Estonian educational interesting. First, Estonia is one of the top-performer according to several international comparisons, including PISA. Second, while Estonia has been dominantly governed by right-leaning governments with strong neoliberal reform agenda, both the presence of choice-initiatives and private provision in education has been explained by hidden and path-dependent paths instead of being decisive policy agendas to (Lauri and Põder 2013). Third, while the detrimental effect of decentralized choice policy has been revealed (Põder and Lauri 2014 a, b), problems of social inequality in general and educational inequality in particular, have been easy to neglect in the policy space with the Soviet legacy discredited left. This study aims to explain the patterns of preferences and party positions in the area of education policy to explore the degree of saliency and coherence of those. We rely on Manifesto Project Data and the educational module of ISSP 2019 panel and combine factor analysis and latent profile analysis in our empirical endeavours.

Literature:

Busemeyer, M. R.; Garritzmann, J. L.; Neimanns, E. (2020). A Loud but Noisy Signal? Public Opinion and Education Reform in Western Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Lauri, T.; Põder, K. (2013). School choice policy: seeking to balance educational efficiency and equity. A comparative analysis of 20 European countries. European Educational Research Journal, 12 (4), 534−552. DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2013.12.4.534.

Põder, K.; Lauri, T. (2014a). Will Choice Hurt? Compared to What? A School Choice Experiment in Estonia. Journal of School Choice, 8 (3), 446−474. DOI: 10.1080/15582159.2014.942177.

Põder, K.; Lauri, T. (2014b). When Public Acts Like Private: the failure of Estonia’s school choice mechanism. European Educational Research Journal, 13 (2), 220−234. DOI: 10.2304/eerj.2014.13.2.220.

Speakers:

Triin Lauri, Post-doc fellow in University of Konstanz and Researcher at TLU CILCS

Kaire Põder, EBS

Location: Zoom (link will be sent to people who have registered)

The series of open seminars is organized by the TLU Center of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Life Studies (IET), funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund (ASTRA project "TLU TEE Tallinn University as a promoter of intelligent lifestyle"). In 2021, the seminars are co-organised by the consortium of YouthLife Project.