Marketisation permeates education systems in the Nordics, and this development is accompanied by the introduction of various choice and consumer-oriented policies. The idea of the citizen as someone who is willing and capable of choosing between different welfare services – including schools – is axiomatic in much of contemporary public policy (Dovemark et al. 2018). While there is a vast literature on school choice in the Nordic countries, less research has focused on how local authorities organize, manage, and construct quasi-markets and competition in relation to education. 

In this paper we aim to contribute to the research on school choice and the role of local authorities in constructing competition for school allocation in Sweden. We do this by exploring the strategies and rationalities of local authorities when handling the non-choosers, e.g. those parents who, for one reason or the other, fail or refuse to make a school choice for the sake of their child. We draw on literature within school choice, policy and organizational theory that highlights the importance of the ‘organizer’ (Arora-Jonsson et al 2020) or ‘market stewards’ (Malbon & Carey 2021). In our case, we focus on the local authorities, and how they organize, manage, and construct competition, as well as their rationalities in relation to the contextual dimensions in where these ‘policy enactments’ take place (Braun et al 2011).  

Within our research project on school allocation, we have mapped and identified four distinct ways in which the 290 Swedish local municipalities organize school allocation for 6-year-olds. In this paper, we use data from municipalities with two of these school allocation systems, Type 1 (n=114) and 2 (n=13) that expect parental activity through different versions of ‘mandatory’ school choice. Furthermore, we analyze qualitative interviews with civil servants in 16 of these municipalities with different policies towards the ‘non-choosers’. 

Results show that non-choosers are managed in two different ways. About half of the municipalities place children of non-choosing parents in schools near their homes, for example by estimating what school they would have chosen if they had made an active choice. The other haft place children after all active choosers have received their school placement. Hence, local authorities merit active and passive actors in their school choice systems rather differently, where various parts of the regulation, the right to a school near home or the right to school choice, are used to justify different policy enactments. The latter disadvantages the passive actors and hence invokes an institutionalization of parents as consumers in creating competition.