De-Genderization at the Nexus of Nationalism and Populism: Policies of Childcare in Turkey and Hungary

From increasing party systemic relevance of populist parties to increasing utilization of populist discourses by mainstream parties, the symptoms of populism are ubiquitous. Notwithstanding the proliferation of research on populism, the effects of populism on social policy continue to remain an explorative field of inquiry. Family has become an important part of the welfare regimes and comparative social policy studies. While some countries pursue policies that strengthen family as an institution, other countries take a more functionalist approach to achieve other ends through family policies. In other cases, through a rights-based approach, policies are enacted to equalize the burden of care between men and women for the latter’s emancipation. Hence, in this paper, we aim to analyze the implications of populism on care policies in Turkey and Hungary which have been adopting pro-family social policies to reveal how populist and nationalist discourses affect both policy-framing and policy-making processes of the care policies in these two countries with different welfare regime settings and legacies. Through a comparative analysis of Turkey and Hungary, this paper will attempt to answer the following research questions: (1) What are the implications of authoritarian populism on gender policy; (2) How populist discourses legitimize de-genderizing family policies; (3) How populist policy-framing and policy-making processes affect the policy outputs in countries with differing welfare regime settings and legacies? The change in family policy in the cases will be analyzed using the ‘Varieties of Familialism’ (VoF) framework. VoF will enable us to delineate both the change in family policy in Hungary and Turkey and also to understand the implications of populism and nationalism for women’s emancipation. To delineate the policy-making process and its effects on policy outputs, we use process-tracing method alongside discourse analysis to understand the divergence and convergence of nationalist populist discourse for policy legitimization and policy outputs in different institutional contexts. We argue that utilization of nationalistic discourse helps the populist governments legitimize de-genderizing family policies through an emphasis on the importance of family as an institution for the well being and security of the nation.