Welfare conditionality and policy contingencies of school‐allowance retractions in Sweden

Abstract

The article analyses policy contingencies and welfare conditionality of school allowances in Swedish upper‐secondary education. In contrast to most countries' use of positive incentives toward school attendance through added cash‐benefits for targeted students, Sweden employs sanctions on a universal study allowance that in essence constitutes an age‐extension of the universal child benefit. We analyse register data from 2012 to 2018 and find significant discrepancies in required school‐reporting when controlling for school populations and key official school‐parameters. These results indicate that negative conditioning through sanctions constitutes an often‐forfeited measure against the rather complex interplay of factors driving truancy, while enforcement of conditionality seems largely contingent upon schools' different reporting strategies and processes. We identify a set of veto points whereby school officials may opt not to enforce conditionality, and further problematize additional findings that the overwhelming majority of students with retracted allowances fail to return to school and complete their educational cycles on time. Our findings contribute to ongoing research on welfare conditionality, hitherto largely dominated by studies on labour market activation policies and social services.