scholarly journals The Partisan Politics of Family and Labor Market Policy Reforms in Southern Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Reto Bürgisser
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Southern Europe ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Fiscal Constraints

This chapter sheds light on the role of political parties as social investment protagonists, consenters, or antagonists in the reform of labor market and family policies in Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Drawing on original, hand-coded data of three decades of labor market and family policy reforms in Southern Europe, the findings show divergent social investment trajectories. While Spain and Portugal have started to develop contours of a social investment agenda, little progress has been made in Italy and Greece. Programmatic political competition and government partisanship play a role in accounting for these divergent trajectories. Center-left parties have acted as the primary social investment protagonists in Spain, Portugal, and Italy. However, the Italian center-left remains fragmented and has rarely been in government. In stark contrast, both center-right and center-left parties in Greece have acted as social investment antagonists. Political and economic turmoil in the wake of the Eurozone crisis paint a bleak picture for the further development of social investment in Southern Europe. Once fiscal constraints can eventually be overcome, a core question remains to what extent an inclusive social investment coalition can be formed in an ever more fragmented political landscape.

From Family to Reconciliation Policy: How the Grand Coalition Reforms the German Welfare State

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 25-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angelika von Wahl
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Policy Change ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Grand Coalition ◽  
Common Denominator ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Traditional Family ◽  
Reconciliation Policies

For decades conservative welfare states have reformed reluctantly. To understand recent family policy reforms in Germany we must add institutions and economics to any account of politics. This article focuses on the grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD formed after the 2005 Bundestag election. Two opposed assumptions pertain to grand coalitions: one holds that a coalition of parties with different ideologies will act according to the lowest common denominator resulting in policy inertia. The opposite holds that grand coalitions enable policy change because constraints are removed by the supermajority. This article develops five conditions for successful reform, arguing that traditional family policies directed at the protection of motherhood are shifting towards reconciliation policies that emphasize labor market activation and increased birth rates. The shift indicates 1) that even conservative states have the potential for bounded reform; and, 2) that agency—particularly partisan and coalitional interests—needs to be considered more seriously.

scholarly journals Social Investment in an Age of Austerity: A Comparison of Family Policy Reforms in Four European Countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-267
Author(s):  
Sonja Blum ◽  
Tatjana Rakar ◽  
Karin Wall
Keyword(s):  
Social Protection ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Parental Leave ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Crowding Out ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
The Great Recession ◽  
The Social ◽  
Post War

The focus of this article is on family policy reforms in four European countries – Austria, Finland, Portugal, and Slovenia – between 2008 and 2015. These years were marked by the ‘Great Recession’, and by the rise of the social-investment perspective. Social investment is an umbrella concept, though, and it is also somewhat ambiguous. This article distinguishes between different social-investment variants, which emerge from a focus on its interaction with alternative social-policy perspectives, namely social protection and austerity. We identify different variants along the degree of social-investment: from comprehensive, over crowding out, towards lean forms. While the empirical analysis highlights variation, it also shows how there is a specific crisis context, which may lead to ‘crowding out’ of other policy approaches and ‘leaner’ forms of social investment. This has led to strong cutbacks in family cash benefits, while public childcare and parental leaves have proved more resilient in the investigated countries. Those findings are revelatory in the current Covid-19 pandemic, where countries are entering a next, possibly larger economic crisis. Key words: family policy; crisis; social investment; austerity; case studies denoted as the end of the ‘golden age’ of the welfare state, putting a halt to its expansion in post-war prosperity. Faced with low growth rates and rising unemployment, the recipe chosen by many countries was to ‘relieve’ labour markets. Alongside such measures as early retirement schemes, family policy was a key part of the reform programme and recourse to parental leave

Is maternal labor market re-entry after childbirth facilitated by mothers’ and partners’ flextime?

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (8) ◽  
pp. 1106-1128
Author(s):  
Yvonne Lott
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Event History Analysis ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Parental Leave ◽  
National Level ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Work Life ◽  
Work Life Balance ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Life Balance

How do national-level work–life balance policies shape the role of flextime in maternal labor market re-entry after childbirth? It is well known that such policies influence the adoption, provision, and support of flexible work arrangements by organizations, but whether they shape the relevance of these arrangements for workers has been neglected in past research. This article analyzes whether mothers’ and partners’ flextime facilitates maternal labor market re-entry after childbirth in Germany, where family policy reforms have been implemented in the last two decades. Event history analysis based on German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data from the years 2003–2013 revealed that mothers were more likely to re-enter the labor market if they had used flextime before childbirth. However, this effect existed only before the implementation of family policy reforms, namely the introduction of parental leave in 2007 and the expansion of public childcare. Moreover, the use of flextime before childbirth did not encourage mothers to maintain previous work hours (the legal right to work part time has existed in Germany since 2001). Partners’ use of flextime before childbirth was found to be less relevant for mothers’ return to work after childbirth. The analysis indicates that generous national-level work–life balance policies can diminish the effectiveness of organizational work–life balance policies for mothers’ employment behavior.

Policy Generosity, Employer Heterogeneity, and Women’s Employment Opportunities: The Welfare State Paradox Reexamined

2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eunmi Mun ◽  
Jiwook Jung
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Policy Reforms ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Government Mandates ◽  
Quasi Experimental ◽  
The Welfare State

Scholars of comparative family policy research have raised concerns about potential negative outcomes of generous family policies, an issue known as the “welfare state paradox.” They suspect that such policies will make employers reluctant to hire or promote women into high-authority jobs, because women are more likely than men to use those policies and take time off. Few studies, however, have directly tested this employer-side mechanism. In this article, we argue that due to employer heterogeneity, as well as different modes of policy intervention such as mandate-based and incentive-based approaches, generous family policies may not always lead to employer discrimination. Adopting a quasi-experimental research design that classifies employers based on their differential receptivity to family policy changes, we compare their hiring and promotion of women before and after two major family policy reforms in Japan, one in 1992 and another in 2005. Our analysis using panel data of large Japanese firms finds little evidence of policy-induced discrimination against women. Instead, we find that employers who voluntarily provided generous leave benefits prior to government mandates or incentives actually hired and promoted more women after the legal changes, and employers who provided generous benefits in response to government incentives also increased opportunities for women.

What does Rachel Carson have to do with family sociology and family policies? Ecological imaginaries, relational ontologies, and crossing social imaginaries

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Doucet
Keyword(s):  
Family Policy ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Rachel Carson ◽  
Research Paradigms ◽  
Alternative Facts ◽  
Family Sociology

In the past decade, multiple compounding crises – ecological, racial injustices, ‘care crises’ and multiple recent crises related to the COVID-19 pandemic – have reinforced the powerful role of critical and social policy researchers to push back against ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, and a post-truth era that denigrates science and evidence-based research. These new realities can pose challenges for social scientists who work within relational, ontological, non-representational, new materialist, performative, decolonising, or ecological ‘turns’ in social theory and epistemologies. This article’s overarching question is: How does one work within non-representational research paradigms while also attempting to hold onto representational, authoritative and convincing versions of truth, evidence, facts and data? Informed by my research on feminist philosopher and epistemologist Lorraine Code’s 40-year trajectory of writing about knowledge making and ecological social imaginaries, I navigate these dilemmas by calling on an unexpected ally to family sociology and family policy: the late American environmentalist Rachel Carson. Extending Code’s case study of Carson, I argue for an approach that combines (1) ecological relational ontologies, (2) the ethics and politics of knowledge making, (3) crossing social imaginaries of knowledge making and (4) a reconfigured view of knowledge makers as working towards just and cohabitable worlds.

Party Politics and Family Policy

1997 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHELLE ROSE MARKS
Keyword(s):  
Family Policy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Party Politics ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
Business Organizations ◽  
Working Parents ◽  
The Family ◽  
Partisan Conflict

The Family and Medical Leave Act offers an excellent case study of a family policy that became embroiled in partisan conflict. The Democratic authors of the bill proposed an extensive leave period available to most workers. Arguing that the policy would pose hardships for businesses, Republicans severely diluted the original legislation, reducing the leave period and eliminating many workers from coverage. The resulting bill offered less support to working parents than leave policies in most other countries. The article opens with a description of problematic features of the bill that derive from partisan politics and then places the drafting of the bill in historical context. The story of the bill's passage is then discussed, highlighting the role of parties and interest groups, especially business organizations. The article concludes by providing a larger analysis of the leave debate.

scholarly journals Family Policy and Child Well-Being: The Case of Montenegro in the European Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (17) ◽  
pp. 9118
Author(s):  
Branko Bošković ◽  
Harriet Churchill ◽  
Oriola Hamzallari
Keyword(s):  
Family Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Work And Family ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Family Resources ◽  
Family Policies ◽  
Life Chances ◽  
Wide Family

Family policies and family support measures have been identified as having major implications for child well-being, particularly through their role in influencing parental and family resources, circumstances and behaviour. The official approach to family policies focuses on opportunities for families to balance their work and family duties and care for their children. This paper analyses the type of policies available in Montenegro compared to the European Union. Potentially, Montenegro will become an EU member state, thus it is important to take a look at Montenegrin practice, as children should have equal life chances and protection of their well-being. Having a solid legal framework per se does not necessarily result in significant positive outcomes, and this paper analyses whether children in Montenegro have the same opportunities for development, in the context of family policies, as their counterparts in the rest of Europe. The focus of the paper will be on the criteria that define family rights and obligations, eligibility, availability and use of family policies in Montenegro. Based on the specific measures and datasets examined, the analysis considers the degree to which a period of family policy investment in Montenegro has been accompanied by improvements in child well-being and family resources, and undertakes comparisons in these regards with EU-wide family policy and child well-being trends. The paper uses a welfare state theoretical approach, with the focus on social investment and relevant data on children’s well-being obtained from the Eurostat, the OECD and the official national statistics.

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