The Politics of Parental Leave Policy under the Multi-Dimensional Party Competition

Research Question: What determines the development of parental leave programs in affluent democracies? Public parental leave policy occupies an intriguing position in social policy. Unlike compensational schemes, which decommodify workers, parental leave schemes aim to recommodify mothers in the labour market. Consequently, the simple left–right perspective—dominant in the existing literature on welfare state politics—fails to account for the variation in parental leave programs. Theory: Drawing from research on post-industrial electoral realignment, this study asserts that the policy positions of political parties in the two-dimensional party competition space determine their preferences for paternal leave policy. Specifically, it argues that the socio-cultural dimension plays a decisive role in preference formation: authoritarian parties do not favour the transformation of traditional family norms through the introduction and expansion of parental leave, while libertarian parties prefer to facilitate women’s economic independence through paid employment with parental leave. Additionally, the socio-economic dimension influences the redistributive aspects of parental leave: leftist parties prefer paid parental leave, while rightist parties prefer unpaid leave. Data and Method: This study tests the propositions above with a new dataset on paid, unpaid, and long parental leave schemes for mothers and paternity and parental leave exclusively reserved for fathers since 1970 in 21 OECD countries. It measures government policy positions in the two-dimensional ideological space using data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Methodologically, this study analyses the time-series-and-cross-section data with mixed-effects models, nesting country-year observations into cabinets, which are nested in countries. Results: The empirical results show that government libertarian–authoritarian policy positions influence the development of parental leave programs. Although contrary to this study’s hypotheses, it finds that centre-to-right libertarian governments are more likely to expand paid parental leave periods, while centre-to-left libertarian governments are more likely to expand unpaid parental leave periods. Additionally, centre-libertarian governments statistically significantly elevate the probability of expanding paid paternity and parental leave for fathers. These results suggest that parental leave programs have been contested along socio-cultural rather than socio-economic dimensions.