Variation All the Way Down: Charting the Subnational Trajectories of School Choice Policy across and within Multicultural Democracies

Abstract The expansion of choice within and outside the public education system has become a defining characteristic of countries across the Western world. Yet comparative analyses of these policy developments at the subnational level, where the most extensive and significant variation exists, are lacking. To address this problem, this article presents a novel index that can be used to track subnational variation in school choice policies. We use this index to chart changes in four multicultural and federal or decentralized countries, Australia, Canada, Germany, and the UK, between 1980 and 2020. Our findings indicate that choice has expanded in nearly all subnational governments over time but that the direction and scale of change is quite varied. Additionally, we show that within-country variation is often as stark as between-country variation and different subnational governments across countries share more commonalities in education choice policies than with their subnational neighbors.