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In recent years, the degree of choice in education systems has increased in most countries. Still, the variation of choice policies across countries is substantial. The authors ask under what combinations of conditions (i.e. institutional features of education systems) choice policy succeeds in balancing educational efficiency and equity. Using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, they investigate the impact of seven institutional conditions in 20 European countries. Those seven conditions are identified in school choice literature as relevant in explaining variations in educational efficiency and equity. The analysis shows that there are multiple causal paths to good policy outcome. The main contribution of this article is to show that ‘choice’ is an INUS condition (i.e. an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient combination of conditions) and that ‘no tracking’ is a necessary condition for educational efficiency and equity. In addition, the authors show that ‘good management’ and ‘competition’ of schools contribute to good educational outcomes only in choice-tolerant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We seek out the good institutional features of the European choice policies that can enhance both equity and efficiency at the system level. For causality analysis we construct the typology of 28 European educational systems by using fuzzy-set analysis. We combine five independent variables to indicate institutional features of school choice policy: availability of choice, tracking, school variability, empowerment of parents, and financial incentive schemes supporting choice policy. Findings show that the most important complements producing efficiency are “no-choice” with “no-tracking” and “choice” together with “tracking” and “school variability.” “No-choice” with “no-tracking” can also lead to more equity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We show that principal component analysis enables the construction of geographic divisions of European social models-Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, Continental, and Postcommunist, that basically follow Esping-Andersen's (1990) welfare regime typology. Instead of Esping-Andersen's criteria of "decommodification" and "stratification," which create typologies of the welfare states-liberal, conservative-corporatist, and social democratic, we compose "social protection" and "commodification" indexes. However, as expected, social-democratic Nordic countries have relatively low "commodification" and high "social protection" scores compared to the other countries. There are some outliers relative to existing typologies-Hungary and the Czech Republic are connected to the Mediterraneans, while Portugal is grouped with the liberal Anglo-Saxons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]