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

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 cashbenefits
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.