Despite similar levels of female employment, centre-left parties in the US, UK and Australia reversed their stance and adopted the issue of childcare for middle-income families at quite different times. Whilst the Democrats put forth – and Congress passed – the Child Development Act in 1971, it was not until 1983 and 1998 that childcare became an electoral issue for the Australian Labor Party and Britain’s New Labour, respectively.
In light of such variation, this paper applies a party competition approach to childcare policy development, focusing on two theories of party position change: “coalition group incorporation” and “coalition group maintenance” (Karol 2009). Had one of these three parties developed a strong stance on childcare in order to attract a new bloc of support (middle-class/females) into their electoral coalition, we might adopt a traditional view of political parties: entities controlled by vote-seeking politicians. However, if a party shifted its stance on childcare in response to the changing demands of traditional party-linked organisations, we might view parties as policy-oriented institutions controlled by a tight coalition of interest groups and activists (Bawn et. al 2012).
This mixed-methods paper utilises elite-level interviews and analyses party manifestos, election surveys and trade union membership data. It finds in each case, both coalition group incorporation and coalition group maintenance help explain variation in the timing of childcare policy development. Policy introduction occurred during the broader processes of dealignment and centre-left party modernization; it was partially driven by party elites in the centre-left who, responding to the exigencies of deindustrialization, developed over time a series of strategies to attract a new bloc of support: (coalition group incorporation). However, it also suggests that centre-left parties hastened their step on the issue once their traditional party-linked groups (trade unions) became increasingly feminized and adopted a pro-childcare stance (coalition group maintenance).
