Policy Paradigms, Instrument Choice, and Inequalities in Child Care Investments in Australia, Canada, and Germany

This paper contributes to the literature on the distributive benefits and burdens of policy making in complex and decentralized systems, by focusing on the dynamics of policy expansion in early childhood education and care policy in three federal systems: Australia, Canada and Germany. All three countries have seen national governments make significant public investments in recent years, often in the name of advancing women’s participation in the labor force but in the context of extant policy paradigms and institutions. Drawing on an original cross-national index, we examine the effects of different childcare finance and delivery methods across time and across the three federal systems. We hypothesize that the more recent government decisions around finance and governance models are influenced by the varying strength of private power in the childcare sector (itself a product of earlier government decisions regarding delivery agents), and a feature which can exacerbate inequalities in access to high quality early years care. The literature on policy feedback effects of delegated governance predicts an accumulation of institutional business power through mechanisms of delegation, deregulation, and accretion (Busemeyer and Thelen, 2020). We examine how institutional business power is mediated by the varying strength of the childcare advocacy movement alongside other factors such as the relative strength/impact of labour organizations and women’s movements at national and subnational levels in each country.