Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Critics of private school choice programs have claimed that self-interested schooling selections could negatively influence the functionality of the democratic system and society. Some scholars argue that public schooling is required to inculcate a set of uniform citizenship skills that are necessary for a stable democratic society. Alternatively, private school choice programs could promote civic values such as voter participation through increasing educational quality through enhanced competitive pressures, an improved match between educator and student, and a higher likelihood of engaging in political discussions at school.

In order to assess these competing theories, we employ probit regression analysis to compare the adult voting activity of students who participated in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) to their matched public school counterparts. We use a sophisticated matching algorithm - known to replicate experimental results - in order to create a traditional public school student control group using data from the state-mandated evaluation of the MPCP. By the time the students are around 19-26 years old, we do not find any evidence that private school voucher students are more or less likely to vote in 2012 or 2016 than students in public schools. These results are robust to all statistical models and remain for all subgroup analyses.