Effects of Socioeconomic Changes on Family Policies and the Mediating Role of Political Institutions

Social policy and its institutions have been changing considerably over the past decades, especially in family policy. Reforms have, for example, expanded public childcare and parental leave programmes. Due to socioeconomic changes there is an obvious need for social policy recalibration, yet the degree of reforms and changes as well as outcomes might depend on political actors and institutions. However, we lack knowledge to what extent national political factors moderate the effect of socioeconomic changes on family policy reforms. The literature so far has explained changes in family policy either with similarity across countries arising from similar socioeconomic changes (e.g. ageing, de-industrialisation and higher female labour force participation) or with diversity because of national institutions (e.g. veto players and partisanship). This paper aims to investigate both the effect of socioeconomic changes on recent family policy reforms and the moderating role of national political institutions and actors. Furthermore, we lack up-to-date analyses for family policy measures other than expenditure data. The paper includes a) a measure for leave periods reserved for fathers, b) an index of disposable income measuring the additional disposable income (after taxes and cash transfers) of a one-earner-two-parent-two-child family as compared to the disposable income of a childless single earner and c) annual changes in public spending on public family policy (in-kind and cash benefits) corrected for the number of young people. Although we are still in the data collection process, we have already performed several specifications of time-series cross-section models covering – depending on the model – 18-22 countries for the years 1990-2012 and 1990-2008 (an update to more recent time periods is planned). In terms of socio-economic factors, processes of de-industrialisation show the strongest and largest effect on our measures of family policy. Trade unions and the number of women in parliaments matter especially for father-specific leave programmes, whereas political constraints (veto players) and countries with strong federalism have negative effects. As further specifications, the paper will apply these models to different time periods allowing to separate time-specific factors.