The Rocky Road to Success. Conservative Feminism, Ideational Competition and the surprising shift of Christian Democratic Family Policy

The Rocky Road to Success Conservative Feminism, Ideational competition and the surprising shift of Christian Democratic Family Policy Christian Democratic Parties have for long been regarded as the cradle of conservative family policy. Throughout the past decade the fundament for such statements has eroded substantially. In Germany, Switzerland and Austria Christian Democrats have adopted positions on family policy that increasingly mirror family policy stances that are usually found amongst Social Democrats in the Nordic countries. In Germany this ideational shift was even followed by a full scale policy shift away from the Continental family-welfare model. This paper argues that the usual explanatory variables such as value shifts in a post-industrial society or employer centred approaches that advocate the ever increasing demand for highly skilled (female) labour are not sufficient to account for these changes. If it were for these general explanatory frameworks Christian Democratic parties on the continent should have changed their positions already two decades earlier. Instead, the paper argues that it is the combination of increasing interparty ideational competition on the issue as well as the increase in strength of intraparty women organisations that accounts for the revolutionary shift in Christian Democratic family policy attitudes. The strength and power resources of conservative women grew substantially throughout the late 1980s and 1990s in all three cases. Nevertheless, this was in none of the cases sufficient to trigger substantial change on policy positions of the overall party platforms. Only when the Christian Democrat’s most credible challenger, the Social Democratic parties updated and progressively altered their traditional bread-winner prescriptions by adopting Scandinavian family policy positions, conservative women had a window of opportunity to convince their own parties to update and renew their family policy. The results of this study are substantial. Not only do they help to explain the counterintuitive fact that Christian Democrats instead of Social Democrats implemented new and modern family policy regimes on the continent but it offers also new insights on how new ideas evolve in politics. The crucial factor that this paper isolates is ideational competition. Only when the most credible challenger in the party arena updates its position on a salient policy, the concurrent has to follow suit if it does not want to risk being pushed out of the electoral market.