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Social investment by popular demand? The electoral politics of employment-centered family policy

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The dataset used to calculate these statistics is the Comparative Welfare States Data Set (2014).

  2. The countries belonging to the remaining regimes are as follows. The Christian democratic regime includes these seven countries: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Whereas Switzerland and the Netherlands are sometimes placed in other regimes (Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser 2011), country experts clearly link them to the Christian democratic regime in terms of their family policy (Kremer 2007).The southern regime includes the four countries of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain (Castles and Obinger 2008). The liberal regime includes seven countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, UK, and the USA (Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser 2011).

  3. For instance, the Balkenende I government in the Netherlands was not included in the analysis because of its short duration. The Kok I government was included, having been in power between August 22, 1994, up to the election on May 6, 1998.

  4. The proposition that leave schemes are always employment-friendly requires some qualification since, past a certain duration, leave schemes inhibit labor market reentry. Calculating the optimal duration of leave for mothers’ employment is complicated since the effects are contingent on various aspects of policy design, though a recent study finds negative employment effects after 2 years of leave (Thévenon and Solaz 2013). There were eight observations where paid leave was longer than 2 years. Models were estimated whereby these observations were recoded as zero or dropped. The findings remain very similar. Model 2 becomes significant at the 0.10 level (instead of 0.05), and Model 4 becomes significant at the 0.05 level (instead of 0.01). It should be clarified that the ‘parental or home care’ leave can be available to one or both parents, although fathers’ take-up rates vary and can be very low in some contexts.

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  1. Department for Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Moira Nelson

  2. Department for Political Science and International Relations, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland

    Nathalie Giger

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  1. Moira Nelson
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Correspondence to Moira Nelson.

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Nelson, M., Giger, N. Social investment by popular demand? The electoral politics of employment-centered family policy. Comp Eur Polit 17, 426–446 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-018-0117-2

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