Pathways towards Caring Countries: Mapping the Global Diffusion of Early Childhood Education & Care Entitlements

The extension of early childhood education and care sits at the center of many recent reforms in family and education policy across the globe. National as well as international actors invoke a diverse set of norms and ideas ranging from ‘social investment’ to ‘human rights’ but converge on two key rationales: First, expanding childcare enables care-givers, primarily women, to enhance labor market participation outside the home increasing family incomes as well as female agency, and second, improves education outcomes as well as equality of opportunity. While the two rationales may seem complementary, they point not only to specific historical trajectories of childcare institutionalization but also sets of drivers: In Europe, studies have found, countries have largely followed either an ‘educational model’ or a ‘work-care reconciliation model’, each associated with a distinct pathway towards universal childcare. Can similar pathways be identified in countries other than the developed welfare states? How far have they progressed and what is driving or inhibiting expansion? Following recent calls to measure entitlements to social services as a key dimension of institutionalization, the paper presents the first global and historical data set of policy reforms, which universalize de-jure access to childcare and preschool. Covering more than 160 countries since the early 20th century the data shows when and how entitlements to public childcare were institutionalized across the world, which age groups were included, and whether the trajectories map onto the models identified in Europe or whether unique developmental paths can be identified in different areas of the world. Generalizing the two pathways, we posit two sets of drivers, which operate on the national and international level: The ‘educational model’ originates in a domestic state-centered logic, which is likely to arise where state-formation goes along with intense conflict between religious and secular forces and is later legitimized and thus reinforced by global cultural models of statehood, that emphasize universal education as a key institution of modern nation-states. The ‘work-care reconciliation model’ arises largely as a reaction to domestic socio-economic transformations, i.e. sectoral shifts and, most prominently, the transition towards service-economies, which shape patterns of female labor force participation, and its political corollaries, i.e. labor and women’s movements, which also sustain transnational linkages and thus allow norms and policy models ‘to travel’. To test whether these factors help explain the emergence and diffusion of universal childcare entitlements across the globe, novel indicators, that capture both the domestic and international layers of state-centered and socio-economic processes, are constructed and employed in event history models. Overall, the paper thus presents the first global and historical overview of the public provision of childcare and preschool, distinguishes educational and welfare-based logics, and tests whether national and international drivers line up with these trajectories. In so doing it also highlights the limitations of identifying common trajectories and drivers over a long time period and a large set of countries.