21. Explaining Recent Shifts in Family Policy
Conveners: Ilona Ostner, Margitta Maetzke
Martin Claude (CNRS, University of Rennes 1 and EHESP School of Public Health, FR)
The end of the French model of family policies?
Seeleib-Kaiser Martin and Toivonen Tuukka (University of Oxford, UK)
Discourse over demographic pressures? Contrasting family policy debates, timing and actors in Germany and Japan
Saraceno Chiara (Social Science Research Center Berlin, DE), Knijn Trudie (Utrecht University, NL)
Explaining differences in family policies developments in Italy and the Netherlands
van Hooren Franca ( European University Institute, IT), Becker Uwe (University of Amsterdam, NL)
Explaining contrasting developments in child and elderly care policies in the Netherlands
Distributed papers
Blome Agnes ( Social Science Research Center Berlin, DE)
The role of political competition in the modernization of family policies -- The German case
Family policies have remarkably changed in recent years, most visibly in some Conservative welfare states, but not exclusively so. Analyses of these changes have focused primarily on the question what kind of policy changes have taken place and presented detailed descriptions of how these changes have came about. Descriptions often include causal accounts, but these are rarely systematically examined in a broader setting. Two types of explanatory accounts can be distinguished:
A: Shifts in family policy as response to socio-demographic changes
▪ The pressure of demographic change is rarely missing, yet, knotty issues about the timing and crossnational variation of large-scale reorientation in family models and family policies immediately emerge. Why are most countries only now willing to respond to longer-standing demographic challenges?
▪ Changing family patterns and attitudes toward motherhood and employment are plausible causal factors, albeit fraught with the same problem of timing. What causes this adjustment to changing patterns of citizen’s aspirations now? Moreover, the direction of causation is not clear in this argument: Changing parental expectations and behaviour may be not the cause, but the outgrowth of policy-makers’ “conscious social engineering”.
B: More proximate causes: Political dynamics and windows of opportunity
▪ Political processes and actors in charge of collective decisions: Family policies have lost much of the partisan character; they appear to be based on elite consensus and top-down decision-making.
New family policies could be part of a model of public policy, in which state officials increasingly “manage” their populations, and participatory forms of policy formation are in decline.
▪ Windows of opportunity in the partisan constellation: Political parties might converge on similar positions regarding family policy reform; such supermajorities might more easily enact far-reaching family policy reforms.
▪ Welfare state institutions, forming the context of family policies: Times of permanent austerity might entail a different outlook on the responsibilities of the state and of family members: If the central strategy to fight families’ poverty is to increase full parental employment, family policy becomes a subset of labour market policies.
This stream will invite proposals that systematically address such explanatory approaches in internationally and intertemporally comparative settings. Comparative and interdisciplinary accounts of the recent shift in family models and family policies are timely in the current situation, in which decisionmaking about most of the drastic reorientations in policy goals and measures has been completed in many Western welfare states, and countries are moving toward implementation.
Ilona Ostner
Institut für Soziologie
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3
37073 Göttingen
Germany
Tel.: +49 551 39 7243
Fax: +49 551 39 7834
iostner@gwdg.de |
Margitta Mätzke
Institut für Soziologie
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 3
37073 Göttingen
Germany
Tel.: +49 551 39 7158
Fax: +49 551 39 7834
mmaetzk@gwdg.de |
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