Privatization of Canadian housing assistance: how bureaucrats on a budget added market-based progams to the toolbox

Maroine Bendaoud ()
Additional contact information
Maroine Bendaoud: National Collaborating Centre for Healthy Public Policy (NCCHPP)

Policy Sciences, 2021, vol. 54, issue 2, No 8, 423-440

Abstract: Abstract Social policy scholarship assumes that left-wing governments favour a stronger public provision of services, while right-wing politics promote privatization, largely as a matter of ideology. Yet the findings on Canadian provinces’ market-based housing instruments suggest that alternative views are possible. Left-leaning governments introduced private delivery mechanisms for economic as well as non-economic reasons. The archival research and thematic analysis of interview responses with key actors (n = 56) suggest that the introduction of housing allowances in the policy toolbox largely results from bureaucratic initiatives, regardless of the party in power. Rather than political forces or advocacy by power interests, this policy change is mostly driven by considerations of equity and efficiency on the part of officials ‘muddling through’. The concept is revisited in the final discussion, where important strands of the privatization literature are challenged, as well as the political assumptions associated with the notion of users’ freedom.

Keywords: Housing; Privatization; Ideology; Bureaucracy; Muddling through (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11077-021-09421-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:policy:v:54:y:2021:i:2:d:10.1007_s11077-021-09421-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11077/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11077-021-09421-7

Access Statistics for this article

Policy Sciences is currently edited by Michael Howlett

More articles in Policy Sciences from Springer, Society of Policy Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().