Attitudes towards Education and Unions: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

• In Event: Methodological Innovations in Comparative Research on Labor

Abstract

How could public education systems be reformed in Latin America? Education reforms are a contentious issue in the region, given that politically influential teacher unions vehemently oppose changes in teacher hiring and promotion practices. For instance, some countries in Latin America have implemented standardized teaching evaluations, while in others, teachers' unions have successfully blocked these changes. However, an emerging body of scholarship also emphasizes the role of business and private foundations in education policy in Latin America.
In this paper, we will examine how business foundations and teachers' unions shape public attitudes towards education reforms in Mexico. Much of this work has been qualitative, focusing on the policy process and the ways in which elites influence policy makers (Tompkins Stange 2017; Tarlau and Moeller 2020; Rice 2020). There is less research on mass influence and the ways in which both unions and businesses influence public opinion, despite some studies on the role of public opinion in influencing education policy (Busemeyer et al. 2020).
By focusing on the contrasting reform efforts of the administrations of Peña Nieto (2013) and López Obrador (2019) in Mexico, we will explore how different political actors' framings of the reform affect public attitudes, either in support or opposition to the reform. We aim to understand how businesses, unions, and education advocacy organizations promote policies to a skeptical public, and which subgroups of voters respond favorably to those appeals. Our survey will also examine how voters respond to conflicts between the state and teachers' unions regarding education policy, and how public sympathies may be shifting regarding teachers' unions.
Methodologically, this paper is based on a survey experiment with a nationally representative sample of Mexican adults (18 years and older). The survey was conducted with 1000 respondents in August 2023. The main outcome variables are modeled after the education reforms implemented by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013, which established standardized teacher evaluations, and the subsequent reforms by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019, which rolled back these standardized teacher evaluations. This research design allows us to estimate the causal effect of different treatments (union and business endorsement) on citizen support for different reform proposals.

Authors

• Mart Trasberg, Tecnologico de Monterrey

• Christopher Chambers-Ju, University of Texas, Arlington