Working Mothers and Well-Cared Children: Two in One in Contemporary European Family Policy?

Our research aim is to indicate different family policies' role in producing and moderating inequality by revealing the patterns of family policies and their abilities producing desirable policy outcomes, such as female labor market participation and fertility rates in particular. Family policy has been a major concern in recent European welfare policies (Esping-Andersen 2002; 2009; Korpi 2000; Korpi et al. 2013; Leitner 2003; Orloff 1996). This importance has often been conceptualized by the policies of new social risks (Hemerijck 2014; Morel et al. 2012), the ones emerging from the social changes taking places within labor and family life and bringing about problems “the old” welfare state policies are not designed to deal with. One of the main challenges of mapping family policies has been related to the dilemmas of (de)familisation and valuation of care (Fraser 1994; Ciccia and Bleijenbergh 2014). The normative assumption behind these analyses has been that by externalizing childcare and opening-up leaves for fathers will help to balance the gender roles and prevent potential under-investment during early childhood. However, most of these analyses (Ciccia and Bleijenbergh 2014; Saxonberg 2012) are struggling with the ambiguity of the concept of defamilialization and the ignorance of parental right for care. Hook (2015) emphasizes the interaction of levels of familialism and levels of economic inequality arguing for the importance of incorporating work-family arrangements to reveal the inequality producing aspects of different “type of familialisms”. We follow this recommendation by adding labor market policies to classical instruments of family policies such as leaves and childcare facilities. We claim that the ability of family policies to mitigate potential inequalities is contingent on the configuration of family policy institutional design. We use fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), which is one of the possible means of tackling configurational causality (Ragin 2008).