Family Policy Regimes Research Articles

Parental Retirement and Fertility Decisions Across Family Policy Regimes

Parental Retirement and Fertility Decisions Across Family Policy Regimes

Welfare regimes and social workers' conceptions of social problems and professional roles

This article compares social work in countries representing four different welfare regimes: Chile, the Republic of Ireland (refer to elsewhere as ‘Ireland’), Lithuania and Sweden. The aim is to examine how social workers in different contexts refer to families’ complex needs, how contextual factors influence social workers’ positions and actions, and how they make sense of their work. Social workers in 15 focus groups, 4 per country except for Chile with 3, were interviewed about their conceptions of ‘family’, ‘families with complex needs’, and reasoning about interventions in relation to a fictitious complex case vignette. The understanding of complex needs appears relatively individualized in Chile and Lithuania, while contextual factors were more pronounced in the Irish and Swedish material. Chile, exemplifying a familialized family policy regime, reflects a poverty-compensatory social worker role that also supports familial reproduction; Ireland, a partly de-familialized regime, reflects a supportive and risk-reactive role; Lithuania, a re-familialized regime reflects a patriarchal risk-reducing role and Sweden, a de-familialized policy regime, reflects a rights-oriented and technocratic role. Welfare regimes shape different social work practice contexts. However, to some extent, social workers around the world share a common work ethos in how they, for the best interest of the people they work with, deal with the cross-pressure from social problems and political-ideological priorities.

The Limits of Change: German Family Policy and the Dynamics of Policy Transfer 2009–2017

German family policy has undergone path shifting reforms departing from the traditional male breadwinner model during the 2000s. These reforms were partially the result of policy transfers from European soft law and the Nordic family model. This contribution analyses which role ‘learning from abroad’ played for the path of German family policy in the years following these reforms and which factors help to explain these dynamics. We find that the relevance and role of policy transfer significantly changed compared to the 2000s: First, policy transfer from both the EU and the Nordic countries lost in importance as a political strategy for German family policy reforms. Second, in the one case of policy transfer from the Nordic states, it was instrumentalised by one of the governing parties to facilitate a shift reversing reform consolidating the old conservative family model. We argue that this change in the dynamics of policy transfer can be traced back to three interdependent explanatory factors: changing actor constellations and motivations of German government coalitions, declining problem pressures due to increasing female labour participation and a higher fertility rate, and a decrease in the transferability of policies from the EU and the Nordic countries. By highlighting the different dynamics and effects of policy transfer for German family policy the paper contributes to the wider theoretical debate about the hybridisation of family policy regimes.

Familien und ihre institutionellen Kontexte: die Bedeutung von Familienpolitik und rechtlichen Regulierungen

This article provides an overview of families and their institutional contexts in Western societies, focusing on the role of family policies and legal regulations in union dynamics, fertility, children’s wellbeing, and intergenerational relations. We argue that family dynamics are driven by changing institutional opportunities and constraints, whereas at the same time, welfare state institutions constantly need to adapt to the changing needs of “new” family forms. The empirical studies covered here provide ample evidence of multiple institutional effects on family-related behaviors and outcomes in a variety of domains. Family policy regimes supporting greater gender equality are those under which favorable outcomes are most likely to occur. Importantly, though, specific effects are not always as large, sustainable, or robust as might have been intended or expected beforehand. Methodologically rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness and efficiency of family policy measures and legal regulations thus appear an important task for future research.

Certain Aspects of Family Policy Incentives for Childbearing—A Hungarian Study with an International Outlook

Decreasing trends in birth rates in developed countries during the past decades, which threaten the sustainability of their populations, raise concerns in the areas of employment and social security, among others. A decrease in willingness to bear children has been examined in the international literature from several (biological, socio-cultural, economic, and spatial, etc.) aspects. Among these, the question of the effectiveness of fiscal incentives has been raised, with arguments that these are positive, but not significant, to birth rates; our study also concludes this. In Hungary, from 2010 onwards, the government has introduced very high tax allowances for families and, from 2015, has provided direct subsidies for housing purposes, all within a framework of a new family policy regime. This paper presents an evaluation of family policy interventions (e.g., housing support, tax allowances, other child-raising benefits), with the conclusion that fiscal incentives cannot be effective by themselves; a sustainable level of birth rates can only be maintained, but not necessarily increased, with an optimal design of family policy incentives. By studying the Hungarian example of pro-birth policies there is shown to be a policy gap in housing subsidies.

Матримониальное поведение россиян на фоне других европейцев

Первая задача данной работы – представить обзор, в котором кратко описывается, как современные исследования объясняют изменения в матримониальном поведении во времени и пространстве (гетерогенность между европейскими странами и внутри России). Вторая задача – выделить основные детерминанты выбора первого матримониального союза, действующие на макро-, мезо- и микроуровнях. Третья и основная задача состояла в поиске ответа на вопрос о том, как изменения в матримониальном поведении россиян соотносятся с тенденциями, наблюдаемыми в других европейских странах. Для этого использовались данные второй волны международного обследования «Поколение и Гендер» и панельная часть трех волн российской части того же обследования. 
 Было выявлено, что в России происходят изменения, характерные для унифицирующихся социальных пространств индустриальных и постиндустриальных обществ: увеличение числа партнеров в течение жизни, постепенное снижение доли людей, вступающих в брак, повышение доли условно одиноких, снижение числа вторых браков. На макроуровне межстрановые различия матримониального поведения объясняются исторически сформировавшимся в стране типом брачности, профилем ценностей граждан, режимом семейной политики государства. В России, как и в других странах, на мезоуровне выбор сожительства или брака в качестве первого брачно-партнерского союза детерминирует тип населенного пункта проживания, а на микроуровне –возраст вступления в союз, предшествие зачатия вступлению в союз, матримониальный опыт родителей, обстоятельства покидания родительского дома и выхода на рынок труда, уровень образования.

Changing Family Policies as a New Welfare Regime in Modern Germany

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The Inter-Country Comparison of the Cost of Children Maintenance Using Housing Expenditure1

AbstractIt is interesting to compare maintenance costs of children between countries with similar yet different family policy regimes because this could yield valuable lessons for researchers and policy-makers and also for the sake of methodological development.In this study, we aim to conduct a comparative analysis of the equivalence scales in Austria, Italy, Poland and France taking into account the age of children. To this end, we use data from the European Income and Living Condition (EU-SILC) to calculate equivalence scales for mono- and duo-parental households for the first and second child. The four countries share common European cultural context, yet differ with respect to social environment, in particular to family policy. We apply the Engel estimation method proposing the share of housing spending in total expenditures as a tool to obtain commodity-specific equivalence scales.Our results are consistent with other studies showing that the cost of a first child is higher than that of a later child. The scale values are not the same across all the countries concerned, with the highest cost observed in Italy and the lowest in Poland.

Does Family Policy Influence Women’s Employment?: Reviewing the Evidence in the Field

During the past two decades, the debate over the relation between family policy and women’s employment in high-income countries has grown in prominence. Nevertheless, the evidence proposed in different disciplines – sociology, politics, economics and demography – remains scattered and fragmented. This article addresses this gap, discussing whether family policy regimes are converging and how different policies influence women’s employment outcomes in high-income countries. The main findings can be summarized as follows: family policy regimes (‘Primary Caregiver Strategy’, ‘Choice Strategy’, ‘Primary Earner Strategy’, ‘Earning Carer Strategy’, ‘Mediterranean Model’) continues to shape women’s employment outcomes despite some process of convergence towards the Earning Carer Strategy; the shortage of childcare and the absence of maternal leave curtail women’s employment; long parental leave seems to put a brake to women’s employment; unconditional child benefits and joint couple’s taxation negatively influence women’s employment but support horizontal redistribution; policies and collective attitudes interact, influencing women’s behaviour in the labour market; and the effect of policies is moderated/magnified by individual socioeconomic characteristics, that is, skills, class, education, income, ethnicity and marital status. The article concludes by suggesting avenues for future research.

Resource-related inequalities in mothers’ employment in two family-policy regimes: evidence from Switzerland and West Germany

ABSTRACTUsing data from the Swiss Household Panel (1999–2012) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (1994–2010), this paper compares the impact of mothers’ education and her partners’ income on maternal employment within the second to the fourth year after childbirth in Switzerland and West Germany. The broadly similar institutional context in the two countries makes for a more controlled and narrower comparison. Around the turn of the millennium, both family-policy regimes did little to foster dual-earner families. However, they differed in their support for families’ caring role (familialistic policies), with West Germany being much more generous. It is expected that these familialistic policies widen the educational gap in maternal employment, by selectively encouraging less-educated mothers to stay at home. Moreover, they are also expected to lower the economic pressure on low-income families to have a second income, thus diminishing the impact of partners’ income. Results confirm this expectation only within the fourth year after childbirth but not within the years before. This is somehow surprising, as central country-differences with respect to familialistic policies refer to the first three years after childbirth.

Generation and the propensity of long career interruptions due to childcare under different family policy regimes: A multilevel approach

This article analyses the generation gap in the duration of long-term career interruptions due to childcare among mothers of two children, and how the differences are moderated by a country’s predominant family policy regime. The outcomes of the multilevel analysis reveal that mothers born after 1960 have significantly lower odds of interrupting their career for longer than 10 years compared with older women. A country’s predominant family policy model plays a significant role in explaining the propensity of long career breaks. Mothers from countries with post-socialist, Southern European and pro-egalitarian models exhibit lower odds of having long-term career interruptions than those in pro-traditionalist countries. Differences between generations are moderated by countries’ family policy models. Among younger generations, the propensity to take long career breaks is lower in post-socialist and non-interventionist regimes than in countries with a pro-traditionalist family policy legacy.

Do ‘institutional complementarities’ foster female labour force participation?

AbstractWe analyse how female labour force participation responds to policies supporting the work-life balance, and do so using country-level data for 18 OECD countries from 1980 to 2007. Included is an original analysis of ‘complementarities’ between different policy measures, as well as of potential variations in their influence across different family policy regimes. The results highlight that expanded childcare service coverage affects women's labour market participation, which is greater in countries where support for working mothers is higher overall. But the influence of each single policy measure varies across regimes. Interactions between policy measures and the context in which they are implemented are important factors to consider since they can, for instance, either foster the positive impact of one measure or lessen the adverse effect of another.

Losing Sight of the Child? Human Capital Theory and its Role for Early Childhood Education and Care Policies in Finland and England since the Mid-1990s

The international interest in early childhood education and care (ECEC) by supranational organisations, including the European Union, has grown considerably due to its dual function of sustaining parental employment and fostering child development. Focussing primarily on child development debates around ECEC, this article argues that human capital theory is the dominant rationale for investing in ECEC. The article discusses the development of ECEC in Finland and England, countries that are considered members of different family policy regimes. It explores the pattern of ECEC developments over time, the extent to which these developments have been framed as human capital investments, the extent that there are references to supranational policy imperatives, and whether there is a growing convergence between the countries around ECEC. Whilst we argue there is some merging in ideas around the function of ECEC in supporting parental employment, there are still differing interpretations when looking at child development that can be related to the cultural and historical origins of ECEC in the respective countries. We voice our concerns that the growing dominance of human capital theory in interpretations of ECEC is resulting in a very narrow view of children and ECEC services.

Fertility, Family Policy and Welfare Regimes

This paper is inspired by the many similarities between gendered welfare state research and demographic research on the determinants of fertility. The first part of the paper discusses some of the theories on childbearing in the light of the gendered welfare state theory. One important similarity between these two genres is that when work-life choices are studied, the emphasis is on policies which enable women to reconcile employment and family. Support for informal care is accordingly treated as having a negative influence on work-life compatibility, and women are moreover assumed to have homogeneous preferences, i.e., they are supposed to want to combine work and family. However, such an approach does not pay sufficient attention to informal care and to heterogeneity among women, either when it comes to preferences or to behaviour. To address these gaps, in the second part of the paper a new framework to analyse women’s work-life choices is developed. The suggested framework gives considerable attention to the way in which formal as well as informal care is supported or enforced in different welfare states and the consequences such support has on women’s decision making. Moreover, heterogeneity among women is emphasised, both in preferences and when it comes to behaviour. The central argument is that women’s heterogeneous preferences transform differently to different lifestyle career strategies (with regard to employment and childbearing) in different welfare state settings, as each lifestyle strategy is encouraged or discouraged by family policy to differing degrees. Hence, the number of women who choose a particular strategy, as well as the level of fertility, varies between the welfare states. In addition, household resources are assumed to influence the choices that are being made. The argument that is put forward is illustrated with recent data on family policy, women’s employment patterns and fertility in the social-democratic (Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden), conservative (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain) and liberal welfare states (Australia, Canada, Ireland, the UK, the USA). Moreover, a reinterpretation of the findings on the relationship between family policy, female employment and fertility is provided in the light of the framework outlined.

The financial crisis and recent family policy reforms in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom

The turmoil created by the financial crisis and economic recession in Europe has served as an impetus for austerity measures in many countries. In this article, we ask whether these crises have also triggered reforms in family policy, and we focus on three European welfare states – Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom – countries that are often considered members of different family policy regimes. The article addresses two main research questions. The first one relates to the number, direction and magnitude of family policy reforms in these three countries since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008/2009, while in the second we discuss whether the reforms observed during this period can be seen as being related to the financial crisis and its later repercussions on the Euro-zone area, or if there are other explanations.

The implications of family policy regimes for mothers’ autonomy

This article is concerned with the implications of different state strategies in the area of family policy for mothers’ autonomy, which I conceptualize as their freedom to choose between employment and homemaking as alternative means of self-fulfillment and economic independence. Using data on 15 OECD countries from the International Social Survey Program, I examine cross-national variation in “the gap” between mothers’ work-family orientations and employment trajectories. Cross-national variation in support for mothers’ choice to work, mothers’ choice to stay at home, or mothers’ life-course flexibility differs from the broad picture suggest by previous research. Specifically, in contrast to suggestions that the well-developed childcare-related provisions in the Scandinavian countries and Belgium and France offer uniquely strong support for mothers’ choice to work, I find that the large majority of countries (13 out of 15) offer at least moderately strong support for “work-centered” mothers’ choice or autonomy. In addition, I find that actual levels of labor force involvement exceeded ideals among the majority of “home-centered” mothers in 7 out of 15 countries. Single mothers living in policy contexts with underdeveloped maternity leave provisions were especially likely to face incentives to work.

Fertility, Female Labor Supply, and Family Policy‡

Abstract The present paper develops an overlapping generations general equilibrium model for Germany in order to study the impact of public policy on household labor supply and fertility decisions. Starting from a benchmark equilibrium which reflects the current German family policy regime we introduce various reforms of the tax and child benefit system and quantify the consequences for birth rates and female labor supply. Our simulations indicate three central results: First, higher transfers to families (either direct, in-kind or via family splitting) may increase birth rates significantly, but they may come at the cost of lower female employment. Second, the introduction of individual taxation (instead of joint taxation of couples) would increase female employment but might further reduce current birth rates in Germany. Third, it is possible to increase birth rates and female employment rates simultaneously if the government invests in child care facilities for children of all ages.

Policy and practice

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop a typology of different family policy systems in Europe and evaluate their impact on the employment strategy of mothers with care responsibilities for dependent children.Design/methodology/approachThe paper outlines a typology of family policy regimes in Europe – covering the 26 countries. A typology based on a cluster analysis of macro indicators of family policy – coverage of childcare, effective parental leave and spending on family policies. The cluster analysis is based on data from OECD family data base. Then follows an analysis of the impact of the different family policy regimes on mothers' employment strategies when they return into gainful employment, based on data from the European Social Survey, 2008.FindingsThe authors have identified four different family policy models: extensive family policy, long parental leave, family care, and cash for care. For each of the models, different strategies are found for take up of employment for mothers with dependent children.Originality/valueThe paper includes 26 European countries, thereby covering the East and Central Europe, which is not the case in most welfare typologies. Furthermore, the authors distinguish clearly in the analyses between the institutional dimension and the outcome – mothers' employment strategies.

Do Family Policy Regimes Matter for Children's Well-Being?

Researchers have studied the impact of different welfare state regimes, and particularly family policy regimes, on gender equality. Very little research has been conducted, however, on the association between different family policy regimes and children's well-being. This article explores how the different family policy regimes of twenty OECD countries relate to children's well-being in the areas of child poverty, child mortality, and educational attainment and achievement. We focus specifically on three family policies: family cash and tax benefits, paid parenting leaves, and public child care support. Using panel data for the years 1995, 2000, and 2005, we test the association between these policies and child well-being while holding constant for a number of structural and policy variables. Our analysis shows that the dual-earner regimes, combining high levels of support for paid parenting leaves and public child care, are strongly associated with low levels of child poverty and child mortality. We find little long-term effect of family policies on educational achievement, but a significant positive correlation between high family policy support and higher educational attainment. We conclude that family policies have a significant impact on improving children's well-being, and that dual-earner regimes represent the best practice for promoting children's health and development.

Introduction: change and continuity in recent family policies

Families have become a focal point in debates of ‘new risks’ and much needed ‘new policies’ for Western welfare states. Family policy responses to the new challenges and even the goals associated with welfare policies designed to aid families have, however, varied across countries, and there is much uncertainty about the sources of this variation and the future development of the policy field. This special issue takes stock of recent developments in the field of family policy. It brings together a range of countries that, taken together, map the full spectrum of advanced industrial countries’ family policy dilemmas, responses, and intervening institutional and ideational variables. Its goal is to take a first step towards explaining the varied degrees and forms of family policy activism in mature welfare states of Western liberal democracies. The introduction to the special issue first sketches the changing nature and social roles of the family, as they evolved along with public law and welfare policies. It then presents family policy regimes which allow for a systematic account of possible intervening factors in the formulation of country-specific responses. Most importantly, the introduction provides a brief outline of plausible causal approaches to the question of family policy change and comments on their strengths and the potential hazards and describes how the papers assembled here may collectively contribute to a better understanding of what drives and shapes family policy development and how these potential causes are interrelated.