Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States
... Our northern Italian setting allows us to broaden the literature by studying the impact of parenthood on voter turnout in a well-developed welfare state where traditional forms of genderappropriate behaviour remain important. Unlike Scandinavian countries, southern European welfare states have historically promoted the gendered division of tasks within households (Morgan 2006). For example, parental leave is relatively short in Italy and mostly reserved for mothers. ...
... international standards. However, Italian parental leave policies continue to reflect the 'southern European welfare state' model (Morgan 2006), encouraging mothers, but not fathers, to take time off work. 7 Italy is a predominantly Catholic country. ...
In many democracies, gender differences in voter turnout have narrowed or even reversed. Yet, it appears that women participate more in some circumstances and men in others. Here we study how life trajectories – specifically, marriage and having children – will impact male and female turnout differently, depending on household-level context. To this end, we leverage a unique administrative panel dataset from Italy, an established democracy where traditional family structures remain important. Our within-individual estimates show that marriage increases men's participation to women's higher pre-marital levels, particularly so in low-income families. We also find that infants depress maternal turnout, especially among more traditional families, whereas primary school children stimulate paternal turnout. Exploring aggregate-level consequences, we show that demographic trends in marriage and fertility have contributed to recent shifts in the gender composition of the electorate. Together, our results highlight the importance of the family as a variable in political analyses.
... Cependant, et à l'instar de la France, l'élaboration puis l'évolution de tels dispositifs dépend des rapports de forces politiques de l'époque. Morgan (2003Morgan ( , 2006Morgan ( , 2009 souligne notamment l'importance de la religion comme force politique dans la construction des dis- Ainsi, Sainsbury (1994) souligne que l'institution du mariage est, par exemple, plus ou moins valorisée selon les pays. Ainsi, en Suède, les enfants à charge (néanmoins nés du mariage avec l'assuré décédé) deviennent un critère suffisant d'éligibilité à la pension de réversion dès 1959 et une durée minimum de mariage n'est plus nécessaire. ...
Cette thèse vise à améliorer les connaissances sur les inégalités de genre à la retraite. Les inégalités de pension entre les femmes et les hommes sont le reflet de l’acquisition différenciée de droits à la retraite pendant la carrière, conséquence de la division genrée des rôles sociaux au sein des couples. Grâce à une approche empirique et avec l’utilisation de données administratives, cette thèse interroge les inégalités de genre à la retraite au-delà des différences de pension moyenne et évalue le rôle des droits conjugaux à la retraite dans ces inégalités. Une première partie introductive décrit la situation française vis-à-vis des dispositifs de droits conjugaux à la retraite. Une deuxième partie propose de prendre en compte la durée de la retraite dans les inégalités de genre. Le chapitre 2 propose une mesure de la durée de retraite passée en situation de veuvage. Le chapitre 3 analyse les différences de décision de départ entre les femmes et les hommes. La durée passée à la retraite est très hétérogène parmi les individus. Les veuves dont les revenus sont les plus faibles passent plus de temps en situation de veuvage. Par ailleurs, les femmes et les hommes ne prennent pas les mêmes décisions de départ à la retraite car les hommes sont plus sensibles aux incitations financières. Enfin, la troisième partie de cette thèse propose des évaluations de réformes des droits conjugaux à la retraite. Le chapitre 4 évalue ex ante une réforme permettant de maintenir le niveau de vie monétaire des survivants au décès de leur conjoint en France. Le chapitre 5 évalue ex post une réforme néerlandaise pour comprendre les conséquences de la suppression de tels dispositifs sur les revenus des veuves en âge de travailler. Les droits conjugaux à la retraite ne remplissent actuellement pas leur objectif de maintien du niveau de vie suite au décès d’un conjoint pour les survivantes les moins aisées, tandis qu’ils le surcompensent pour d’autres. La suppression de ces dispositifs augmenterait l’offre de travail des veuves en âge de travailler mais amplifierait la proportion de bénéficiaires d’autres prestations sociales.
... Cependant, et à l'instar de la France, l'élaboration puis l'évolution de tels dispositifs dépend des rapports de forces politiques de l'époque. Morgan (2003Morgan ( , 2006Morgan ( , 2009 souligne notamment l'importance de la religion comme force politique dans la construction des dis- Ainsi, Sainsbury (1994) souligne que l'institution du mariage est, par exemple, plus ou moins valorisée selon les pays. Ainsi, en Suède, les enfants à charge (néanmoins nés du mariage avec l'assuré décédé) deviennent un critère suffisant d'éligibilité à la pension de réversion dès 1959 et une durée minimum de mariage n'est plus nécessaire. ...
Cette thèse vise à améliorer les connaissances sur les inégalités de genre à la retraite. Les inégalités de pension entre les femmes et les hommes sont le reflet de l'acquisition différenciée de droits à la retraite pendant la carrière, conséquence de la division genrée des rôles sociaux au sein des couples. Grâce à une approche empirique et avec l'utilisation de données administratives, cette thèse interroge les inégalités de genre à la retraite au-delà des différences de pension moyenne et évalue le rôle des droits conjugaux à la retraite dans ces inégalités.Une première partie introductive décrit la situation française vis à vis des dispositifs de droits conjugaux à la retraite. Une deuxième partie propose de prendre en compte la durée de la retraite dans les inégalités de genre. Le chapitre 2 propose une mesure de la durée de retraite passée en situation de veuvage. Le chapitre 3 analyse les différences de décision de départ entre les femmes et les hommes. La durée passée à la retraite est très hétérogène parmi les individus. Les veuves dont les revenus sont les plus faibles passent plus de temps en situation de veuvage. Par ailleurs, les femmes et les hommes ne prennent pas les mêmes décisions de départ à la retraite car les hommes sont plus sensibles aux incitations financières. Enfin, la troisième partie de cette thèse propose des évaluations de réformes des droits conjugaux à la retraite. Le chapitre 4 évalue ex ante une réforme permettant de maintenir le niveau de vie monétaire des survivants au décès de leur conjoint en France. Le chapitre 5 évalue ex post une réforme néerlandaise pour comprendre les conséquences de la suppression de tels dispositifs sur les revenus des veuves en âge de travailler. Les droits conjugaux à la retraite ne remplissent actuellement pas leur objectif de maintien du niveau de vie suite au décès d’un conjoint pour les survivantes les moins aisées, tandis qu’ils le surcompensent pour d’autres. La suppression de ces dispositifs augmenterait l’offre de travail des veuves en âge de travailler mais amplifierait la proportion de bénéficiaires d’autres prestations sociales.
... Contributing to the Netherlands' conservative label is the "one-and-a-half-earner" model, where mothers are expected to be caregivers first and foremost, and earners secondarily and part-time (e.g., Misra et al., 2007;Morgan, 2006). The Netherlands has the highest percentage of female part-time workers in the European Union. ...
The purpose of the study is to contribute to an understanding of the cultural and normative meaning of birth motherhood and how lesbian couples decide who carries the child. The decision of who carries the child is central in lesbian family‐making, carrying consequences for life after birth. Even so, it has been relatively overlooked in research. Drawing from the sociology of personal life and Park's (2013) conceptualization of monomaternalism, we study how informants consider and decide birth motherhood. Semistructured interviews with both partners in 21 pregnant lesbian couples in the Netherlands were thematically analyzed. The meaning of birth motherhood was ambivalent, linked to femininity, socially recognized motherhood, and biogenetic imaginaries. In couples where both wanted to carry, age, which carried different symbolic meanings, was a powerful tiebreaker. Our study shows how the monomaternalist norm shapes conceptualizations of birth motherhood. Desires to experience pregnancy are strong for many. Referring to age can be a way for couples to defuse tension, but it can also be a resource drawn upon to close further negotiations. Our study carries implications for policy makers, health care workers, and mothers‐to‐be. Scholarly, it illuminates the ways in which motherhood, in its various forms, is perceived and recognized.
... Broadly, the results presented here dovetail into broader disciplinary conversations and research on the down-stream consequences of social policies in the United States(Brush 2011;Morgan 2006;Rothstein 2017). When examining the effects of social policies, it is important for scholars to consider substantive insights about the focal outcome of interest (e.g., homicides) and determine the proper level of analysis (e.g., individual, county, state, country). ...
This dissertation examines the causes and effects of four major firearm-related policies in the United States: Concealed Carry Weapons (CCW), Stand Your Ground (SYG), Child Access Prevention (CAP), and Universal Background Checks (UBC). Applying a social movement approach, the first research question addresses how a social movement organization (SMO) has employed resources to shape the adoption of (counter-)movement-related legislation. Using the gun rights movement as a case-in-point, I explore how campaign contributions – conceptualized as a professionalized SMO resource – have been employed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) to shape the adoption of CCW, SYG, CAP, and UBC laws at the state-level between 1990 and 2016. Employing event-history analyses and mediation models, I find campaign contributions are associated with social movement successes – in this case, policy adoption – albeit indirectly: NRA campaign contributions have no direct association with the adoption of any state-level firearm-related legislation. However, campaign contributions do effectively shape the percentage of Republican legislators in a given state’s legislature which, in turn, increases the adoption of gun rights laws (SYG) and decreases the adoption of gun control laws (CAP). The second research question examines the extent to which state-level firearm-related policies affect local-level homicides above and beyond socio-criminological correlates. Although the majority of homicides are conducted with a firearm and homicides vary greatly across counties, gun policy scholarship has often ignored socio-criminological insights and, in turn, may be making inaccurate inferences about the impact of gun policies on homicides, including firearm-related homicides. Analyses presented in this chapter employ hierarchical (i.e., counties nested in states) logistic and negative-binomial models to address substantive and methodological shortcomings in extant gun policy research. Focusing on recent homicide data (2014-2016), results indicate socio-criminological correlates, specifically at the county-level, robustly explain variation in the number of reported homicides, including those associated with firearms. In contrast, state-level gun policies do not seem to provide any additional explanation of county-level homicide variation above these correlates.
How can social scientists uncover the root causes of contemporary outcomes? Many scholars have assumed that a problem associated with identifying root causes—the problem of infinite regress—poses a central impediment to this endeavor. However, few have attempted to clearly conceptualize infinite regress or offer more than solutions in passing. This article undertakes the challenge. I begin by conceptualizing infinite regress as the potentially endless cycle initiated when assessing the relative weight of proximate versus antecedent causes in a causal chain. Next, how do we weigh causes in such causal chains? I build on Mahoney, Kimball, and Koivu’s “sequence elaboration” method, and argue that this method is best suited to approach the problem. Yet, sequence elaboration cannot tell us when to stop our search. How do we know we have arrived at a root cause? I evaluate six potential “stopping rules” using various historical examples and suggest that three of these offer coherent possible solutions: the “critical juncture stopping rule,” the “necessary and sufficient cause stopping rule,” and the “mechanism stopping rule.”
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed, but did not create, the caregiving crisis in the United States: for most people, it was already a major ordeal to provide reproductive labor. The caregiving crisis was less visible before the pandemic because it was suffered unequally, in part due to the different positions of American women. Some women paid other women to do care work, women received differing sets of benefits from federal and state governments, and some women got far more support from their employers than did others. Pandemic-induced shocks, including the closure of K–12 schools and childcare centers, and reduced access to domestic workers and elder care workers, seemed to have triggered a closer alignment of perspectives and interests among diverse women. Although women’s demands for support seem to have pushed the Biden administration to propose more expansive family policies, stereotypes and norms that marginalize care work and care workers within families and across the economy also need to change to achieve equality for women.
After decades of value change toward more favorable views of maternal employment, the trend has slowed down and even reversed in some Western countries. This article argues that political parties play a crucial yet neglected role in shaping the trajectories of value change: the dynamics resulting from interparty competition place parties in a position to provide cues to the electorate and to actively shape attitudes toward maternal employment. Partisan cueing should become particularly relevant with a declining relevance of party competition on economic issues. The results from multilevel regression models provide empirical support for this perspective.
Résumé
Cet article vise à expliquer les motifs pour lesquels le Québec finance les écoles privées alors que la province voisine, l'Ontario, ne leur apporte aucune aide directe. L'auteure avance que ces politiques sont liées à la configuration religieuse des provinces au moment de l’établissement de leur système d’éducation. Au Québec, où la religion catholique était dominante, l'autorité de l'État sur l'éducation a été contestée jusqu'au milieu du 20 e siècle par l’Église catholique. En revanche, en Ontario, les églises protestantes, qui étaient majoritaires, ne sont pas opposées au développement des écoles publiques. L'État s'est alors rapidement imposé comme l'autorité suprême en matière d'éducation. Au 20 e siècle, les politiques des gouvernements des deux provinces ont été influencées par l'héritage des décisions prises un siècle plus tôt.
In recent years, the welfare state literature has been witnessing a "religious turn," (re)reminding us the pivotal role of religion in shaping the modern welfare state. Notwithstanding its theoretical importance, this turn has been largely confined to European, North American, and antipodean settings. By drawing upon the historical case of Israeli burial services, this study seeks to make a modest step in closing this theoretical and empirical gap. Specifically, its findings point to the historical role of the Judaism in establishing universal burial services, funded by the state and operated almost exclusively by religious burial societies. Moreover, this policy legacy, which already had its roots in the British Mandate rule, is still at work, even in an era of "permanent austerity." These findings problematize mainstream historical observations, which view the Israeli welfare state as a secular project, by suggesting a more nuanced and progressive role for Judaism in its history.
This introduction to the special issue on case study research, which showcases cutting edge research by emerging scholars on France, describes the connection between these articles and current developments in political science methodology. SI contributors situate their analyses in thick description of France itself, demonstrating how modernity, rationality, common sense, citizenship, and democracy are inherently abstract concepts that only take on political meaning and significance within a specific national context. Simultaneously, these essays flesh out mid-level theories that are more amenable to cross-national generalization without losing rigor in the process, contributing to broader political science literature on experience versus reason, the European and Christian roots of secularism and how this contributes to contemporary discrimination, welfare state development, and political lawyering and the judicialization of politics.
In the United States, preschool education is characterized by the dominance of a variegated private sector and patchy, uncoordinated oversight of the public sector. Tracing the history of the American debate over preschool education, Andrew Karch argues that the current state of decentralization and fragmentation is the consequence of a chain of reactions and counterreactions to policy decisions dating from the late 1960s and early 1970s, when preschool advocates did not achieve their vision for a comprehensive national program but did manage to foster initiatives at both the state and national levels. Over time, beneficiaries of these initiatives and officials with jurisdiction over preschool education have become ardent defenders of the status quo. Today, advocates of greater government involvement must take on a diverse and entrenched set of constituencies resistant to policy change.
In his close analysis of the politics of preschool education, Karch demonstrates how to apply the concepts of policy feedback, critical junctures, and venue shopping to the study of social policy.
In this article we reassess conceptions of the welfare state with an eye towards the limits of current scholarly approaches. In particular, we propose centering the study of the welfare state around those who occupy the margins of American society. We argue that concentrating on populations at the proverbial “bottom” of standard economic and political hierarchies productively reorients research on social policy and politics by bringing crucial but often overlooked facets of the welfare state into sharper view. Specifically, the bottom-up approach we offer here entreats political scientists to re-consider where they look in their efforts to delineate the welfare state, how to examine what they find, and what kinds of questions to ask in the process. Ultimately, studying the welfare state from the bottom up suggests a host of new directions for scholars seeking to understand its politics.
The logic of French mental health policy—which already stands out against that of other countries—also appears at odds with the usual logic of French social policy. “La sectorisation psychiatrique” rejected the liberalism prominent in the rest of the health system, adopted Beveridgean principles decades in advance of other policy areas, and began to centralize precisely during the period of déconcentration. This article explains these puzzles by pointing to the role of public sector trade unions. Archival sources document how the historical advocacy of unions representing public psychiatric workers shaped public policy in mental health. Examining their political activity can revise standard interpretations of the French welfare state and illuminate a generalizable theoretical relationship for comparative analysis.
Prominent research has claimed that work–family reconciliation policies trigger ‘tradeoffs’ and ‘paradoxes’ in terms of gender equality with adverse labor market consequences for women. These claims have greatly influenced debates regarding social policy, work, family and gender inequality. Motivated by limitations of prior research, we analyze the relationship between the two most prominent work–family reconciliation policies (paid parental leave and public childcare coverage) and seven labor market outcomes (employment, full-time employment, earnings, full-time earnings, being a manager, being a lucrative manager and occupation percent female). We estimate multilevel models of individuals nested in a cross-section of 21 rich democracies near 2005, and two-way fixed effects models of individuals nested in a panel of 12 rich democracies over time. The vast majority of coefficients for work–family policies fail to reject the null hypothesis of no effects. The pattern of insignificance occurs regardless of which set of models or coefficients one compares. Moreover, there is as much evidence that significantly contradicts the ‘tradeoff hypothesis’ as is consistent with the hypothesis. Altogether, the analyses undermine claims that work–family reconciliation policies trigger trade-offs and paradoxes in terms of gender equality with adverse labor market consequences for women.
Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time.
This article analyses the socio‐economic determinants of public preferences towards public spending and parental fees for childcare and how they are conditioned by institutional contexts. Previous studies of childcare policy preferences have focused on attitudes regarding the provision of care. However, when it comes to questions of financing, we know astonishingly little about how supportive individuals actually are of expanding pre‐school early childhood education and care, and how support varies across different socio‐economic groups in society. This is an important research gap because childcare provision and how it is financed have redistributive implications, which vary depending on the institutional design of childcare policy. Using novel and unique survey data on childcare preferences from eight European countries, we argue and show that preferences towards expanding childcare are more contested than it is often assumed. The institutional structure of childcare shapes how income matters for preferences towards how much should be spent and how provision should be financed. Where access to childcare is socially stratified, the poor and the rich develop different preferences towards either increasing public spending or reducing parental fees in order to improve their access to childcare. The findings in this article suggest that expanding childcare in systems characterised by unequal access can be politically contested due to diverging policy priorities of individuals from different social backgrounds.
Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of this subject. The GDR, the Communist state with the greatest proportion of elderly citizens, needed to create a socialist model of aging. Neither the Communist tradition in Weimar Germany, nor the experience of the other states in the Communist bloc provided substantial guidance. East Germans looked instead for inspiration to West Germany, which was itself engaged in a debate about aging and pension policy. By grappling with the Western experience, including its perceived and real limitations, the GDR in the Ulbricht developed a vision of what it meant to age as a socialist.
The lack of US paid parental leave policies has increasingly gained public and political attention. Yet it is unclear whether public support for such a policy will translate to enactment. To better understand support for leave, we compare it to another major gender policy issue: abortion rights. Using a unique question from the 2012 General Social Survey, our logistic models show that: (a) respondents who support more liberal abortion policy are more likely to support some amount of leave rather than no leave; and (b) abortion rights support does not distinguish between respondents who support some paid leave over a more robust leave policy. We also highlight that the strongest support for leave comes from political liberals and those who hold progressive views toward gender roles, who are also abortion rights supporters. Overall, sources of policy support for the two issues somewhat overlap, but findings also echo the previously discussed divided and inconsistent landscape of US gender-family policy.
The goal of this article is to use the seven case analyses of gender equality policy implementation covered in this special issue to apply and further develop the gender equality policy in practice approach and agenda. Through using the case of France as laboratory to examine if, how and under what conditions gender equality policy implementation leads to success, overall gender transformation and enhanced gender equality, this article provides a more accurate policy recipe for gender equality policy success and the importance of the post-adoption phases of implementation and evaluation in that recipe.
Childcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work–family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work–family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.
This study investigates the relationship between maternal employment and state-to-state differences in childcare cost and mean school day length. Pairing state-level measures with an individual-level sample of prime working-age mothers from the American Time Use Survey (2005–2014; n = 37,993), we assess the multilevel and time-varying effects of childcare costs and school day length on maternal full-time and part-time employment and childcare time. We find mothers’ odds of full-time employment are lower and part-time employment higher in states with expensive childcare and shorter school days. Mothers spend more time caring for children in states where childcare is more expensive and as childcare costs increase. Our results suggest that expensive childcare and short school days are important barriers to maternal employment and, for childcare costs, result in greater investments in childcare time. Politicians engaged in national debates about federal childcare policies should look to existing state childcare structures for policy guidance.
Der Beitrag erläutert das Konzept des Wohlfahrtsstaatsregimes, beschreibt die drei in der Forschungsliteratur ursprünglich unterschiedenen Regime – das sozialdemokratisch-skandinavische, das konservativ-kontinentale und das liberalangelsächsische Regime – und ergänzt diese um den zuletzt als zusätzliches Modell identifizierten südeuropäischen Wohlfahrtsstaat. Der Beitrag skizziert dann eine Erklärung für die Ausbildung dieser verschiedenen Regimetypen und endet mit einer kurzen Erörterung der Anwendbarkeit des Regimekonzepts auf andere Weltregionen, insbesondere Südamerika und Asien.
In diesem Kapitel wird über vier sozio-ökonomische Veränderungen berichtet, die Herausforderungen für den Wohlfahrtsstaat darstellen: Die Alterung unserer Gesellschaften, die De-Industrialisierung, das Abflachen des Wirtschaftswachstums und die steigende Einkommensungleichheit. In international vergleichender Perspektive wird gefragt, worin die Herausforderung für den Wohlfahrtsstaat besteht, welches Ausmaß diese Veränderung im zeitlichen Vergleich hat und wie Politik versucht, sie zu beeinflussen oder sozialpolitisch auf sie zu reagieren.
This paper reflects on the gender inequalities and their influence in the access to labor market and, on the other one, to reproductive process. Maternity and work often arise as choices excluding one another due for the inadequacy of care services. The essay reviews some laws of the last years for encourage the work-life balance and analyzes the presence of the services for children in Palermo. The “case study” of the municipality of Palermo shows a general lack of services and a progressive reduction of public nurseries and kindergarten, despite the economic investments of the last decades at institutional level. It points out how many obstacles persist that discourage female participation in the labor market, but above all discourage procreative choices in the couples “dual earner”, with negative effects on future generational balances.
The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects.
Studies of the “delegated state” highlight the growing role of nongovernmental organizations to fulfill public purposes. We argue that America’s delegated state has taken two distinct forms: a civic-public model prominent in the North and Midwest and a very different religious-private model more evident in the South and the West. Distinctive regional legacies rooted in European immigration, religion, race, and the timing of urban growth gave rise to diverse organizational configurations for assisting the poor in different parts of the country. As a consequence, the institutions for assisting the poor are weaker in the growing regions of the South and Mountain West.
Employment-centered family policies enable parents to combine work and family, thereby improving work–life balance for individuals and families as well as increasing GDP. For these reasons, these policies constitute a central component of the social investment approach, a model for how to design social policies for contemporary societies. This study seeks to understand whether voters enable the expansion of these policies and therein promote social investment. The literature suggests that voters may reward governments that expand such policies for reducing work–life tensions at a relatively low cost. Yet support may wane if voters oppose mothers’ employment or face few opportunities to take up such policies (e.g., due to barriers to labor market entry). Left parties are found to gain from expanding day care but lose votes for expanding leave schemes, a finding which partially explains the vote losses for leave expansion before the activation turn. Generous day care and leave schemes in the social democratic regime entail an electoral logic, whereby governments escape vote losses for the expansion of leave schemes and gain from expanding day care. The remaining results do not reach statistical significance and should be interpreted with care.
Spätestens seit dem Wandel der westlichen Demokratien von Industrie- zu Wissensgesellschaften sind Bildung und Bildungspolitik zentrale Themen der vergleichenden Sozialstaatsforschung geworden. Dieses Kapitel bietet einen Überblick über die politikwissenschaftliche, historisch-vergleichende Literatur zu Bildungspolitik und diskutiert das komplexe Zusammenspiel von Bildungs- und Sozialpolitik. Im zweiten Teil des Kapitels stellen wir Sozialinvestitionspolitik als ein neues Paradigma der Sozialpolitikforschung vor und diskutieren dessen politökonomische Dynamik und Effekte.
As adults, the baby boomers would foment political and cultural revolutions and produce dramatic shifts in American domestic and foreign policies in the late twentieth century. At the root of these changes were their memories of childhood in Dwight David Eisenhower's America. In the United States, growing Cold War anxieties made the baby boom a product not only of the unprecedented postwar affluence, but also of a commitment to national pronatalist ideals in the face of an ideological threat. In addition to making family time fun, American parents of the baby boom generation also struggled with new expectations of keeping their child safe from harm. Teens learned the style, slang, and mannerisms of the youth culture from the era's films and musical performers. Heterosocial interaction was a key element of Youth culture, as popularity was measured by one's acceptance by the opposite sex.
Building and sustaining solidarity is an enduring challenge in all liberal-democratic societies. Ensuring that individuals are willing to accept these “strains of commitment,” to borrow John Rawls’ apt phrase, has been a worry even in relatively homogeneous societies, and the challenge seems even greater in ethnically and religiously diverse societies. This paper focuses is on the political sources of solidarity. Much has been written about the economic and social factors that influence the willingness of the public to accept and support immigrants and minorities. But solidarity is also a political phenomenon, which can be built or eroded through politics. In addition, our focus on the political sources of solidarity. Understandably, the existing literature concentrates on the politics of backlash and exclusion. This paper looks at the politics of diversity from the opposite direction, asking what are the potential sources of political support for inclusion, and the conditions under which they are effective. How is solidarity built? How is it sustained? Reframing the analysis in this way does not necessarily produce optimism about the future prospects. But exploring the potential political sources of support leads to broader, multilayered perspective with long time horizons. The paper advances a framework for analysis which incorporates three levels: the sense of political community, the role of political agents, and impact of political institutions and policy regimes. Each of these levels, and the interactions among them, matter.
This article explores potential cleavages and conflicts between political support coalitions of social investment versus classical social transfer policies. To that extent, we analyse international survey data from the European Social Survey (ESS) for 21 European countries. Our central finding is that different welfare state beneficiary groups perceive and react negatively to increased government involvement in policy fields from which they do not benefit themselves: single parents are more likely to oppose government support for the unemployed when long-term replacement rates in the unemployment benefit scheme are high. Vice versa, the unemployed are less likely to support the public provision of childcare services if the latter is already well-funded. This finding has implications for the study of welfare states in general because it implies that in mature welfare states, political conflicts may be less about the welfare state as such, but about the distribution of welfare state services and benefits between different groups of beneficiaries.
The Netherlands is characterized by extensive national work–life regulations relative to the United States. Yet, Dutch employees do not always take advantage of existing work–life policies. Individual and focus group interviews with employees and managers in three (public and private) Dutch organizations identified how employee and managerial communication contributed to acquired rules concerning work–life policies and the interpretation of allocative and authoritative resources for policy enactment. Analyses revealed differences in employees’ and managers’ resistance to policy, the binds and dilemmas experienced, and the coordination of agreements and actions to complete workloads. There are also differences between public and private contexts in the enactment of national and organizational policies, revealing how national (e.g., gender) and organizational (e.g., concertive control) mechanisms play out in employee and managerial communication that determine the use of work–life policies.
BACKGROUND Unlike actual fertility, fertility intentions are often found to be positively correlated with education. The literature explaining this paradox is scarce. OBJECTIVE We aim to fill the gap in the existing scientific literature by searching for the main factors that influence highly educated women to plan a larger family size. METHODS Using the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey for four countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Italy, and Norway), we analyse the relationship between mother's socio-economic status and daughter's fertility intentions, controlling for daughter's socio-economic status and sibship size. Zero-inflated Poisson regression models are employed to estimate the predictors of women's additionally intended number of children. RESULTS We find that the effect of family of origin is exerted mainly through sibship size among childless daughters: Daughters with more siblings intend to have more children. After the transition to parenthood, the effect of family of origin is exerted mainly through the mother's level of education: Daughters with highly educated mothers intend to have more children. CONCLUSIONS The empirical results suggest that the positive link between births intentions and level of education might not merely be an artefact generated by the design of cross-sectional surveys but the outcome of a better socio-economic status that allows forming positive reproductive plans. CONTRIBUTION The positive role of mother's socio-economic status on daughter's fertility decision-making offers a valuable interpretation of the positive link between education and fertility intentions which goes beyond the alternative explanations referring to self-selection, partner effect, or time squeeze, and needs to be confirmed by further research.
Over the past two centuries, institutions of early childhood education (henceforth ECE) have developed all over the Western world. There have been considerable national and regional differences in the nature and pace of these developments, however, and up to about 1970 those variations did not in any systematic way correlate with changes in the economy or the family (cp. Bahle 2009; Willekens 2009b). It is only as regards public care for children under three that an abundant social policy literature shows a connection between the rise in female labour market participation and the availability of such care (see e.g. De Henau et al. 2007). This chapter however focuses on the development of institutions whose main purpose is to educate children below school age, regardless of whether such institutions also enable mothers to do paid work.
Across Europe and North America (and in other parts of the world to which we can claim no expertise), we have witnessed in recent decades a spectacular development of institutions and arrangements designed for the education and care of young children (those under compulsory school age) outside the family. In no society have young children ever been raised by their parents alone, but, with a few exceptions, collective education and care in the past took place within networks of individuals who knew each other and who were tied to each other by complex social obligations (e.g. networks of kin or neighbourhood solidarity). The early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC) which has come to define the life of young children in contemporary societies is of a wholly different nature: it is always regulated and often directly supplied by the State; its establishment has most often been the result of intentional policies pursuing specified social goals; and the individuals providing the services do so for money and not on the basis of personal ties with the parents or children.
Once early childhood education (ECE) had developed beyond the purely charitable and philanthropic initiatives of the first decades of the nineteenth century, a legal-institutional framework was bound to develop. This legal framework then facilitated and constrained the kind of ECE which could further develop; in other words, given the legal framework some ways of offering and organizing ECE then became easier, others more difficult (or even impossible, if the State outlawed some forms of ECE, as Prussia did in with the Froebelian Kindergärten from 1851 to 1860, or as France did in 1904 with the Catholic écoles maternelles). The legal framework can be expected to change if the goals pursued by ECE change (as they appear to have done from the 1960s). It is therefore important to look at the way in which the law deals with ECE. The purpose of this chapter is to analyse different stages of the changing regulation and legal frames of ECE institutions and to build up a kind of periodization with the intention of understanding where we are now, and how commonalities and differences among European countries have evolved over time.
Do family policies influence women’s employment rates? Differences in women’s employment rates, particularly for women of childbearing age, appear to be associated with the complex of work-family supports available to families. In this chapter we explore differences in women’s employment in France and the Netherlands over recent decades, taking a comparative-historical approach to examine the factors that shape women’s employment. We ask whether family policies actually drive women’s employment, or whether they may be better understood as responses to women’s employment patterns. At the same time, we explore alternative explanations for the variation in women’s employment — including the economic conditions that may drive women’s employment and cultural differences regarding gender, care, and work. While quantitative approaches may identify associations across a range of countries, we argue that comparative historical methods are best suited to exploring historically situated relationships among policy, politics, economics, culture, and women’s labor market participation.
In Spain today, preschool attendance rates are among the highest in the European Union (EU) for children aged three, four and five (96 percent, 100 percent, and 100 percent respectively). In contrast, Spanish child-care attendance rates are comparatively low for children aged two and under. Why is Spain at the vanguard of the European Union (EU) regarding preschool attendance rates for children aged three, four and five years? After briefly describing in the first section of this chapter the main Spanish preschool policies since 1975, in the second section I present the analytical framework to answer this question. In the third, fourth and fifth sections, I explain that in Spain most child-care provision has historically been part of education policy. Between the mid-1930s and 1975, Spain was governed by a right-wing authoritarian regime headed by General Francisco Franco. A transition to democracy and a stable democracy followed the dictatorship. After 1975, policy-makers continuously expanded the programmes that were already in place: public preschool services for children under the age of mandatory education (six years). In postauthoritarian Spain, the context was favourable for the increase in public preschool supply because the Catholic Church, which is a principal actor in education, is interested in the expansion of preschooling, provided that part of it is private and subsidised by the state.
In recent decades, it is possible to point to a new and evolving debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture, focused on the implications of feminism's changing relations to institutions of state power and law in the United States. According to these analysts, to whom we refer as the critics of feminism in power, the alliances formed between some feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, coupled with the installation of feminist ideas in law and state institutions problematize the once commonly held assumption, shared by second-wave feminists, that all women, regardless of differences in social location, face certain kinds of exclusions. With women entering formal positions of power from states to NGOs to corporations, this assumption cannot stand. Critical analysts of feminists in power insist that we consider the implications of advancing a feminist politics not from the margins of society but from within the precincts of power. They shine a light on a change in feminism's relation to institutions of state power and law as reflected in new political alliances forming between feminists and neoliberal and conservative elites, and the political and discursive uses to which feminist ideas and ideals have been put. Building on work on inequalities and hierarchies among women, these critics take up specifically political questions concerning the kind of feminist politics to be promoted in today's changed gendered landscape. Perhaps most notably, they make explicit a concern shared by radical political movements more generally: what does it mean when the ideas of those who were once considered political outsiders become institutionalized within core sites of state power and law? At the same time, the very broad-brush narratives concerning the cooptation of feminism by neoliberalism put forth by some of these analysts could be complemented with historical and empirical research on specific instances of feminism's reciprocal, though still unequal, relationship with neoliberalism and state power.
The modern welfare state, which was created in the long economic expansion of the post-World War II era, funded benefits that provided income security across the life course. In the 1970s, the era of welfare state expansion slowed due to rising deficits and fiscal strains associated with population aging. In recent decades benefit reductions have become commonplace. Theories designed to explain the formation of welfare state include the logic of industrialism, power resource theory, and the theory of welfare state regimes. Feminist critics challenged theorists to consider how welfare benefits influence gender inequality within regime types. In recent years, research has focused on three key issues. The first is to identify variations in welfare state attitudes across nations and among individuals within nations. The second is to consider the causes and consequences of activation policies that focus less on direct cash transfers and more on a combination of incentives and punishments to encourage work effort. Finally, the third is to expand the definition of the welfare state to include the private provision of goods and services as well as education.
Keywords:
welfare state;
comparative;
attitudes;
activation policies;
privatization
In contrast to the scholarship allied with first and second waves of feminism, feminist analysts today survey a changed landscape of gender across the United States and much of the world: formal exclusions and discrimination are outlawed, gender hierarchies have been undermined, and women are appearing among economic, political, and other elites to an unprecedented degree even as gender inequalities stubbornly persist across multiple arenas. A focal point of debate among analysts of sexuality, political economy, and culture is the meaning and implications of pursuing gender equality in a world that no longer neatly divides into subordinated women and powerful men, and in which the increasing number of women among the socially advantaged problematizes traditional notions of female victimization and male domination. In this essay, we first offer an overview of earlier approaches to gender equality, then turn to critiques of these approaches which insist on the need for a new starting point for considering gender equality and women's emancipation.
Keywords:
feminist;
political economy;
sexuality;
gender;
female victimization;
male domination;
gender equality;
feminism
In unserem Beitrag untersuchen wir die Rolle der Religion für die Ausgestaltung der Familienpolitik. Während die „klassische“ Staatstätigkeitsforschung den Einfluss von Religion vornehmlich auf die Stärke christdemokratischer Parteien oder auf generelle kulturelle Ländermuster zurückführt, betonen „neuere“ Ansätze der Wohlfahrtsstaatsforschung die Bedeutung religiöser Werte in der Bevölkerung die Ausgestaltung des Staat-Kirche-Verhältnisses sowie die historische Rolle verschiedener Strömungen des Protestantismus für die Entwicklung und Ausgestaltung von Wohlfahrtsstaatlichkeit. Unser Beitrag kontrastiert die beiden Forschungsstränge im Rahmen eines systematischen quantitativen Vergleichs von 27 OECD-Staaten und evaluiert die relative Erklärungskraft der klassischen und neueren theoretischen Argumente, um auf diese Weise zu einem differenszierteren Verständnis des Zusammenhangs von Religion und öffentlicher Familienpolitik zu gelangen.
The gendered division of housework is the linchpin in a broader system of gender inequality. Consistent with pioneering feminist theories of gender stratification, this cross-national study demonstrates this approach with multi-level models that consider individual as well as cultural and structural variables that are associated with the absolute time men and women spend doing housework. Building on research relating national gender ideology to the husband-wife shares of housework, this paper asks how gender ideology relates to the absolute amount of time that men and women spend doing housework. Complementing this cultural indicator, the paper introduces a previously neglected constraint on domestic practices, asking whether the quality of a country’s housing stock predicts weekly hours in housework. Drawing on 2012 International Social Survey Program data for 20 European countries, we study nationally representative samples totaling 7733 respondents who were ages 18–65 and legally married, cohabiting, or in civil partnerships. Even controlling for individual-level covariates, results confirm that men and women perform less housework in countries where public opinion supports gender equality. In countries with more substandard housing, however, women, but not men, spend more time in housework than they do elsewhere.
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