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AbstractThe marketization of schools and of other public services is supposed to have changed the relationship of citizens to the state in many Western countries over the last 30 years. One explicit aim of marketization has been to increase citizen influence over public services. Yet, studies of its effects on citizens' willingness to address public decision‐making remain scarce in general, and nonexistent as regards schools. In this study, a survey experiment taps the causal effects of both user choice and private provision. The results show that marketization significantly reduces respondents' intention to influence schools and related political and bureaucratic decision‐making. The effects are robust and, in contrast to those of previous studies, driven by significant effects from the user choice introduced in connection with marketization. The pacifying effects recorded suggest that marketization potentially reduces public services' responsiveness to citizens' interests, thereby aggravating the problems it was meant to address.

This is a thesis about expansions of consumer choice, their causal effects on political engagement, and the democratic implications that follow. For material and ideological reasons alike, consumer choices have expanded over the last decades and are likely to become even more present in citizens' lives in the future. Scholars' appraisal of this expansion of consumer choice ranges from, on the one hand, seeing it as a threat to active citizenship to, on the other hand, celebrating it as inherently democratic. The thesis accepts the assumed democratic potential of consumer choice as a means for conveying legitimate political preferences and affecting political outcomes. Yet the introduction shows that, from the perspective of normative democratic theory, citizens' consumer choices are under most circumstances democratically inferior to civic engagement that addresses formal political decision-making. It is thus a pressing question whether there actually are elements in consumer choices that reduce citizens' inclination to engage in conventional forms of political participation. This empirical question is addressed in the three essays. The essays tap the effects of consumer choices in different contexts, such as parents' school choices for their children (Essay I), consumer choices that interact with citizens' political motivations, i.e. "political consumption," (Essay II), and consumer choices regarding plainly private consumer goods (Essay III). All the three essays account for causality and do so by means of experimental designs. In addition, the essays are similar in that their results point in the same direction: expansions of consumer choice reduce citizens' willingness to conventional political participation. Given the democratic significance of conventional participation and the pervasiveness of consumer choice, the results are important both from a scholarly perspective and from a broader societal perspective. The results cast new light on a wide range of issues about the extension of consumer choices and their presence in citizens' lives, including e.g. decisions about user choice in welfare services and advertising regulation. This thesis does by no means end the discussion about such policies, but demonstrates the significance of a certain outlook: issues about the extension of consumer choice are issues about democratic values.

The prevailing trend of treating voting-rights as a privilege for citizens has been challenged by a lively debate among democratic theorists. Growing numbers of resident non-citizens and non-resident citizens are likely to make voting-rights regulations more politically salient. Yet, these issues are largely missing in studies of public opinion and little is known about the support for the citizenship-requirement and its more or less democratic alternatives. Informed by normative democratic theory, this article opens the research field by conducting the first comprehensive study of attitudes toward competing requirements for voting-rights, using a conjoint experiment on a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens. The results indicate that considerable proportions of respondents support a residency-requirement and a democratically dubious economic contribution-requirement, restricting voting-rights to taxpayers only. Nevertheless, the current citizenship-requirement is supported by a majority across sociodemographic groups, indicating sociological legitimacy of the current order and some but limited leeway for changes.