A conflicted political will to levy local taxes: inequality and local school politics in Sweden, 1840–1900

Abstract

Through an extensive study of 12 parishes in the Sundsvall region, this article, informed by studies in the economic history of education, examines changes and continuities in local school politics during the period of 1840-1900. Using the Sundsvall region in the northern part of Sweden as its point of departure, this article shows how basic political conflicts shifted when political franchise, tax regulations and the social structure of the region changed during the second half of the nineteenth century. At the end of the investigated period, the basic conflict of school politics was no longer between those who owned land and those who did not but rather between high-and low-income groups. Judging from local school politics, the local elites of the Sundsvall region, in contrast to local elites in the USA, England, Spain and Prussia, focused their attention on school funding. The main conflicts between the social groups not only concerned the distribution of school expenditures but also included issues, such as the location of schools.

The role of industrialisation in education expenditure: municipal budgets in Biscay, 1860-1910

“…Land access and living standards played an important role as they could determine whether families were able to or wanted to educate their children as well as the spending capacity of public institutions on education (Beltrán Tapia 2013;Humphries 2013;Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga 2018;Palacios-Mateo 2023). Moreover, elites and institutions had different perceptions on how education should be provided and funded (Becker and Woessman 2009;Andersson and Berger 2016;Westberg 2018). Similarly, state development played an important role, as education could be used to reinforce the nation-building process during this period (Weber 1976;Boli et al 1985).…”

“… 8 See Westberg (2018), Cappelli and Vasta (2020) and Beltrán-Tapia and Martínez-Galarraga (2018) for Sweden, Italy and Spain, respectively.…”

Education and household decision-making in Spanish mining communities, 1877–1924

“…Similarly, Humphries (2011, pp. 340-343), looking at individual data in England finds that children whose father was a miner were relatively less educated, measured in years of school, than 1 Among other factors during the 19th and early twentieth centuries, for the role of inequality see for instance, Cinnirella and Hornung (2016), Beltrán Tapia and Martinez-Galarraga (2018), or Westberg (2018), for the influence of Religion see Becker and Woessman (2009), or for what was the impact of governments and policies see Cvcek and Zajicek (2019) or Cappelli amd Vasta (2020). 2 Factors such as the number of siblings also affected children's education, as the probability of being literate was lower in families with high fertility (Fernihough 2017;and Klemp and Weisdorf 2019).…”

Domestic and local influences in education policy

“…The contributions of Westberg (2018) and Larsen (2018) both offer novel analyses of local historic trajectories of school development and change. The policy study of Baek, Hörmann, Karseth, Pizmony-Levy, Sivesind and Steiner-Khamsi (2018) shows how domestic research dominates policymakers' usage of research in contemporary incremental reform documents.…”