Rethinking the Welfare State: The prospects for ... - e-Library

Conclusion 219
such complexity or contentiousness that the hours and effort required are likely to exceed
the cap. While adjusting the value of the voucher in some cases would alleviate this
problem, containing countervailing moral hazard problems is likely to be intensive in its
demands on administrative resources.
The politics of vouchers
Our book has predominantly been concerned with the normative properties of
government by voucher as an idea in a wide variety of contexts. However, we have also
attempted to address the positive politics of government by voucher in these contexts. It
is now over 30 years since Milton Friedman first proposed the voucher concept in the
context of primary and secondary school education, but it has yet to gain wide acceptance
in this context. 10 In Friedman’s view, this is a case where a good idea has been subverted
by entrenched special interests, in particular teachers’ unions and the educational
bureaucracy, whose material self-interest is likely to be adversely affected by a more
competitive environment for the provision of educational services. 11 Is it the case that
government by voucher is invariably a good idea, but is destined to languish as a result of
the disproportionate political influence of vested interests? In this book, we have sought
to show that, depending on how various critical design issues are resolved, government
by voucher is not an unambiguously good idea in all the service contexts in which it has
been proposed. Similarly, we would argue that where it is a good idea, the power of
special interests is unlikely to be so overwhelming that, deterministically it can be
assumed that they will always subvert the idea. Thus, in evaluating why government by
voucher has not been adopted in various contexts, attention is required both to the
soundness of the idea and the salience of vested political interests in explaining the
persistence of prevailing policies and their resilience to change.
With respect to the politics of vouchers, the most important point to be made is that
there is no single politics of vouchers. 12 Each programmatic context considered in this
study is likely to yield its own particular configuration of political interests favouring or
opposing the adoption of voucher schemes. To the extent that generalization is possible,
it seems likely that the politics surrounding the introduction of new government
expenditure programs through utilization of the voucher concept, in contexts where the
government has previously played no or a limited role (e.g. child care, long-term care),
will tend to differ from contexts where the government has previously played a major
expenditure and delivery role and is contemplating the substitution of a voucher scheme
for pre-existing delivery modalities. In the first class of case, groups on the traditional left
of the political spectrum may well favour the introduction of voucher systems, while
forces on the political right are likely to resist the additional government expenditures
required to finance such programs. In the second class of case, forces on the political
right may well favour the adoption of voucher schemes, on the grounds of their perceived
superior efficiency in terms of the cost and quality of services, while forces on the
political left may see such schemes as threatening political interests with whom they
identify (e.g. unionized public sector employees). However, while these factors may
suggest the general configuration of political interests that one might expect to find