Pub Date : 2024-09-18DOI: 10.1177/09589287241284780
Helena Blomberg, Christian Kroll, Laura Tarkiainen
Increasingly, evidence-based policymaking, in the form of randomized control trials (RCTs) in particular, are advocated as a means for studying the effects of planned social policy measures. Additionally, a Finnish basic income experiment was conducted in 2017–2018 as an RCT as a means of exploring alternative policy solutions, which gained widespread national and international political, media and scholarly attention. Despite the popularity of RCTs, there is a lack of studies of participants’ experiences of participation in social policy RCTs. In this article, we depart from the notion of ‘lived experiences’ when investigating a bottom-up participant perspective of the Finnish social policy experiment with the purpose of contributing to the understanding and future planning of ethically and methodologically sustainable policy experiments. Drawing on a qualitative, in-depth interview study of 81 Finnish basic income experiment participants, we examined their lived experiences and related views on the experiment. The analysis shows that although the idea of experimenting to demonstrate ‘what works’ in social policy was supported by participants in principle, various questions arose both concerning the tactical and political purposes of the experiment and the nature of scientific ‘evidence’. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the impact of the media and political attention often surrounding more controversial policy experiments, like the Finnish one, can also challenge the RCT principles of ‘non-contamination’. Participants in highly politicized experiments also easily feel that they become objects of strong moral expectations and judgements, which in the Finnish basic income case clearly resulted in feelings of frustration and personal failure.
{"title":"What works? Researching participants’ experiences of a social policy RCT through qualitative interviews","authors":"Helena Blomberg, Christian Kroll, Laura Tarkiainen","doi":"10.1177/09589287241284780","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241284780","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, evidence-based policymaking, in the form of randomized control trials (RCTs) in particular, are advocated as a means for studying the effects of planned social policy measures. Additionally, a Finnish basic income experiment was conducted in 2017–2018 as an RCT as a means of exploring alternative policy solutions, which gained widespread national and international political, media and scholarly attention. Despite the popularity of RCTs, there is a lack of studies of participants’ experiences of participation in social policy RCTs. In this article, we depart from the notion of ‘lived experiences’ when investigating a bottom-up participant perspective of the Finnish social policy experiment with the purpose of contributing to the understanding and future planning of ethically and methodologically sustainable policy experiments. Drawing on a qualitative, in-depth interview study of 81 Finnish basic income experiment participants, we examined their lived experiences and related views on the experiment. The analysis shows that although the idea of experimenting to demonstrate ‘what works’ in social policy was supported by participants in principle, various questions arose both concerning the tactical and political purposes of the experiment and the nature of scientific ‘evidence’. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that the impact of the media and political attention often surrounding more controversial policy experiments, like the Finnish one, can also challenge the RCT principles of ‘non-contamination’. Participants in highly politicized experiments also easily feel that they become objects of strong moral expectations and judgements, which in the Finnish basic income case clearly resulted in feelings of frustration and personal failure.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142265950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-09-10DOI: 10.1177/09589287241271037
Simone Tonelli, Eloisa Harris, Franziska Deeg
This study investigates how the economic crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic impacted support for social assistance in Germany. We formulate our expectations drawing from the classical political economy literature on self-interest and the burgeoning research on the role of solidarity. On the one hand, we hypothesize that only low-income individuals impacted economically by COVID-19, who can benefit from social assistance, will support its expansion. On the other hand, we expect higher-income individuals affected economically by COVID-19 to be more supportive of social assistance, even though they do not benefit from it, and less likely to consider welfare recipients ‘undeserving’ compared to higher-income individuals not economically affected by the pandemic. We argue that first-hand crisis experiences update people’s beliefs about how luck impacts one’s economic situation in the presence of an exogenous shock. We combine observational and experimental data from an original survey collected in Germany in April 2021 to test our expectations. On average, low-income respondents appear to be the most vigorous supporters of social assistance, but their support is not conditional on their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, we find that the support for more social assistance among affluent individuals depends on the economic impact of the pandemic. We experimentally manipulated the deservingness of welfare recipients and found that better-off respondents impacted by the pandemic were less likely to penalize even the most ‘undeserving’ welfare beneficiaries. We suggest that solidarity between classes in hard times may occur through a convergence of the deservingness perception among individuals. The article has broader implications for studying the effect of crises on solidarity and the conditional nature of class-based explanations for support for different welfare policies.
{"title":"Cross-class solidarity in times of crisis: the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on support for redistribution","authors":"Simone Tonelli, Eloisa Harris, Franziska Deeg","doi":"10.1177/09589287241271037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241271037","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates how the economic crisis associated with the COVID-19 pandemic impacted support for social assistance in Germany. We formulate our expectations drawing from the classical political economy literature on self-interest and the burgeoning research on the role of solidarity. On the one hand, we hypothesize that only low-income individuals impacted economically by COVID-19, who can benefit from social assistance, will support its expansion. On the other hand, we expect higher-income individuals affected economically by COVID-19 to be more supportive of social assistance, even though they do not benefit from it, and less likely to consider welfare recipients ‘undeserving’ compared to higher-income individuals not economically affected by the pandemic. We argue that first-hand crisis experiences update people’s beliefs about how luck impacts one’s economic situation in the presence of an exogenous shock. We combine observational and experimental data from an original survey collected in Germany in April 2021 to test our expectations. On average, low-income respondents appear to be the most vigorous supporters of social assistance, but their support is not conditional on their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, we find that the support for more social assistance among affluent individuals depends on the economic impact of the pandemic. We experimentally manipulated the deservingness of welfare recipients and found that better-off respondents impacted by the pandemic were less likely to penalize even the most ‘undeserving’ welfare beneficiaries. We suggest that solidarity between classes in hard times may occur through a convergence of the deservingness perception among individuals. The article has broader implications for studying the effect of crises on solidarity and the conditional nature of class-based explanations for support for different welfare policies.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-09-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142227743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-30DOI: 10.1177/09589287241268490
Margarita Estévez-Abe, Costanzo Ranci
The COVID-19 outbreak, which most severely impacted older citizens, served as a stress test for residential eldercare facilities. The mortality rates of care home residents varied widely across countries in 2020 before vaccinations became available. Why have some countries been better (or less) able to protect their older citizens in care homes? This article examines the role of specific characteristics of national systems of residential care in enhancing or weakening the capacity of these systems to protect their residents from the pandemic and seeks to draw some lessons for the future. Because the mortality rate in care homes strongly correlates with the overall infection rate within the community, this article adopts an innovative approach to conceptualize and measure the protection capacity of national residential care systems more specifically – that is net of mortality rates within the community. The study makes important contributions to the care policy field. The traditional care regime typology fails to explain cross-national variations in the protective capacity of care homes. Governmental spending on long-term care systems certainly matters for protective capacity but we find that a factor previously neglected by care regime scholars also matters. More specifically, we show that the pattern of staff organization affects protective capacity. Our findings call for a rethinking of care systems in the face of future pandemics.
{"title":"COVID-19 hits care homes: A cross-national study of mortality rates","authors":"Margarita Estévez-Abe, Costanzo Ranci","doi":"10.1177/09589287241268490","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241268490","url":null,"abstract":"The COVID-19 outbreak, which most severely impacted older citizens, served as a stress test for residential eldercare facilities. The mortality rates of care home residents varied widely across countries in 2020 before vaccinations became available. Why have some countries been better (or less) able to protect their older citizens in care homes? This article examines the role of specific characteristics of national systems of residential care in enhancing or weakening the capacity of these systems to protect their residents from the pandemic and seeks to draw some lessons for the future. Because the mortality rate in care homes strongly correlates with the overall infection rate within the community, this article adopts an innovative approach to conceptualize and measure the protection capacity of national residential care systems more specifically – that is net of mortality rates within the community. The study makes important contributions to the care policy field. The traditional care regime typology fails to explain cross-national variations in the protective capacity of care homes. Governmental spending on long-term care systems certainly matters for protective capacity but we find that a factor previously neglected by care regime scholars also matters. More specifically, we show that the pattern of staff organization affects protective capacity. Our findings call for a rethinking of care systems in the face of future pandemics.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142223897","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-23DOI: 10.1177/09589287241240317
Dominic Durocher
In the last decades, several countries introduced new income-tested child benefits and targeted in-work tax credits to boost the income of low-income families. Inspired by the power resource theory, I postulate that left-wing governments tend to increase benefits to low-income families because their ideology favours redistribution and to consolidate the vote of low-income families, but that both right- and left-wing governments increase benefits for middle-income families. The impact of left-wing governments should be stronger in countries with a weak bargaining system as social partners are unable to reduce inequalities between families. To demonstrate this argument, I use statistical analyses based on OECD data to measure the effect of government ideology and corporatism on the level of benefits received by low- and middle-income families in OECD countries from 1982 to 2019. The results indicate that left-wing parties have a significant impact on benefits received by low-income families, but not on benefits received by middle-income families. Also, even though corporatism is associated with different types of child benefits, it does not influence the relationship between left-wing governments and benefits received by low-income families.
{"title":"Targeted transfers, a left-wing policy? The impact of left-wing governments and corporatism on transfers to low-income families (1982–2019)","authors":"Dominic Durocher","doi":"10.1177/09589287241240317","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241240317","url":null,"abstract":"In the last decades, several countries introduced new income-tested child benefits and targeted in-work tax credits to boost the income of low-income families. Inspired by the power resource theory, I postulate that left-wing governments tend to increase benefits to low-income families because their ideology favours redistribution and to consolidate the vote of low-income families, but that both right- and left-wing governments increase benefits for middle-income families. The impact of left-wing governments should be stronger in countries with a weak bargaining system as social partners are unable to reduce inequalities between families. To demonstrate this argument, I use statistical analyses based on OECD data to measure the effect of government ideology and corporatism on the level of benefits received by low- and middle-income families in OECD countries from 1982 to 2019. The results indicate that left-wing parties have a significant impact on benefits received by low-income families, but not on benefits received by middle-income families. Also, even though corporatism is associated with different types of child benefits, it does not influence the relationship between left-wing governments and benefits received by low-income families.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142183406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-08-03DOI: 10.1177/09589287241268442
Veronika J Knize, Markus Wolf
Active labour market programmes (ALMPs) should help young adults who collect welfare benefits ‘get back on track’. Despite the recent proliferation of research on ALMPs, only scant attention has been paid to their employment quality effects. Aiming to fill this gap, this article evaluates the long-term effects of German ALMPs on young adults’ employment quality. We measure employment quality with two indicators: one on whether someone has a job with earnings below the low wage threshold and the other on whether they have a job with earnings above the low wage threshold. These measures help us assess whether ALMPs prevent young adults from being at risk of poverty again. In addition, we study whether ALMP effects vary by social origin. We distinguish young adults by whether their families collected benefits when they were adolescents, as a marker for disadvantaged social origin. We analyse in-firm training and one-euro jobs as examples for enabling and workfare programmes, which exist across other welfare states as well. Empirically, we apply an entropy balancing approach to a self-drawn sample from registry data to analyse ALMP treatment effects. Results show that in-firm training enhances young adults’ employment quality in the long run. The effects tend to be lower for those from disadvantaged families though, indicating that disadvantages embedded in social origin remain. The workfare programme harms participants’ employment quality, with those less disadvantaged suffering the greatest damage. Overall, our research provides evidence that in-firm training effectively enables young adults to find a job of higher quality, addressing their risk of social exclusion and proving useful in promoting upward social mobility. Nonetheless, the article also raises urgent issues concerning how the needs of those most vulnerable can be addressed by social policy.
{"title":"Help or harm? Examining the effects of active labour market programmes on young adults’ employment quality and the role of social origin","authors":"Veronika J Knize, Markus Wolf","doi":"10.1177/09589287241268442","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241268442","url":null,"abstract":"Active labour market programmes (ALMPs) should help young adults who collect welfare benefits ‘get back on track’. Despite the recent proliferation of research on ALMPs, only scant attention has been paid to their employment quality effects. Aiming to fill this gap, this article evaluates the long-term effects of German ALMPs on young adults’ employment quality. We measure employment quality with two indicators: one on whether someone has a job with earnings below the low wage threshold and the other on whether they have a job with earnings above the low wage threshold. These measures help us assess whether ALMPs prevent young adults from being at risk of poverty again. In addition, we study whether ALMP effects vary by social origin. We distinguish young adults by whether their families collected benefits when they were adolescents, as a marker for disadvantaged social origin. We analyse in-firm training and one-euro jobs as examples for enabling and workfare programmes, which exist across other welfare states as well. Empirically, we apply an entropy balancing approach to a self-drawn sample from registry data to analyse ALMP treatment effects. Results show that in-firm training enhances young adults’ employment quality in the long run. The effects tend to be lower for those from disadvantaged families though, indicating that disadvantages embedded in social origin remain. The workfare programme harms participants’ employment quality, with those less disadvantaged suffering the greatest damage. Overall, our research provides evidence that in-firm training effectively enables young adults to find a job of higher quality, addressing their risk of social exclusion and proving useful in promoting upward social mobility. Nonetheless, the article also raises urgent issues concerning how the needs of those most vulnerable can be addressed by social policy.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141931245","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-06-21DOI: 10.1177/09589287241258605
Carmen Walenta-Bergmann, Tobias Wiß
Country comparisons, often suffering from unobserved heterogeneity and obscuring subnational variation, dominate the social policy literature. However, the subnational level is better suited to reduce the omitted variable bias. This article distinguishes between social consumption and social investment policies and investigates their determinants at the subnational level. Following the literature across countries, we test the role of incumbent parties’ ideology, but for within-country variation in social policy. Austria is a case in point because states have discretion in social policy (e.g., regarding public childcare and social assistance). Panel regressions covering all nine states in Austria for the years 1991 to 2019 reveal that the cabinet share of Social-Democrats increases social investment spending, while the Christian-Democratic party decreases it, and the populist radical right party reduces expenses for social consumption.
{"title":"The politics of subnational social policy: Social consumption versus social investment in Austria","authors":"Carmen Walenta-Bergmann, Tobias Wiß","doi":"10.1177/09589287241258605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241258605","url":null,"abstract":"Country comparisons, often suffering from unobserved heterogeneity and obscuring subnational variation, dominate the social policy literature. However, the subnational level is better suited to reduce the omitted variable bias. This article distinguishes between social consumption and social investment policies and investigates their determinants at the subnational level. Following the literature across countries, we test the role of incumbent parties’ ideology, but for within-country variation in social policy. Austria is a case in point because states have discretion in social policy (e.g., regarding public childcare and social assistance). Panel regressions covering all nine states in Austria for the years 1991 to 2019 reveal that the cabinet share of Social-Democrats increases social investment spending, while the Christian-Democratic party decreases it, and the populist radical right party reduces expenses for social consumption.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141508357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-17DOI: 10.1177/09589287241252008
Daniel Dinale
This article interrogates the impacts of different types of family benefits expenditures on the positive relationship between female employment and fertility rates in developed welfare states. It does this by theorizing how these family benefits align with welfare state regimes’ preferences for different normative gender-role ideologies. Rather than treating family benefits as a monolith, this article investigates the impact of disaggregated expenditures in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) family policy database (1. services and in-kind benefits, 2. child-related cash benefits and 3. tax-based financial support for children) on both female employment and fertility rates. This is done using pooled time-series analysis covering the period 2000–9. The analysis yields evidence that expenditure most reflecting a ‘full egalitarian’ gender ideology including service and in-kind benefit provision has the most positive association with female employment and fertility due to an emphasis on defamiliarization. The picture for child-related cash benefits is mixed due to the presence of cash transfer provisions not employment-contingent captured in the indicator. In contrast, tax-based financial support for children harms female employment, reflecting a maternalistic ‘traditional’ ideological orientation, but is positive for fertility rates indicating a moderate pro-natal effect of tax-based financial support for children.
{"title":"The positive relationship between female employment and fertility rates: The role of family benefits expenditure and gender-role ideologies","authors":"Daniel Dinale","doi":"10.1177/09589287241252008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241252008","url":null,"abstract":"This article interrogates the impacts of different types of family benefits expenditures on the positive relationship between female employment and fertility rates in developed welfare states. It does this by theorizing how these family benefits align with welfare state regimes’ preferences for different normative gender-role ideologies. Rather than treating family benefits as a monolith, this article investigates the impact of disaggregated expenditures in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) family policy database (1. services and in-kind benefits, 2. child-related cash benefits and 3. tax-based financial support for children) on both female employment and fertility rates. This is done using pooled time-series analysis covering the period 2000–9. The analysis yields evidence that expenditure most reflecting a ‘full egalitarian’ gender ideology including service and in-kind benefit provision has the most positive association with female employment and fertility due to an emphasis on defamiliarization. The picture for child-related cash benefits is mixed due to the presence of cash transfer provisions not employment-contingent captured in the indicator. In contrast, tax-based financial support for children harms female employment, reflecting a maternalistic ‘traditional’ ideological orientation, but is positive for fertility rates indicating a moderate pro-natal effect of tax-based financial support for children.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140963106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-17DOI: 10.1177/09589287241251993
Thomas Eichhorn, Claudia Zerle-Elsäßer
Previous literature on paternal involvement emphasizes the influence of fathers’ socialization contexts, considering either welfare policies (Hipp and Leuze, 2015) or experiences with their own fathers (Brown et al., 2018; Parke, 1995). In this study, we combine those two branches of research and examine how fathers’ and their fathers’ (grandfathers’) socialization experiences (parental leave regulations in their early adulthood as an example of (de-)familization policies (Lohmann and Zagel, 2016)) predict paternal involvement today. To measure paternal involvement, we create an indicator for involvement that covers Lamb et al. (1985) three aspects of direct interaction, responsibility, and availability and the fact that a father has taken paternal leave for at least one of his children or not. We use the fact that a substantial proportion of the fathers in the German, national survey AID:A 2019 (Kuger et al., 2020) were socialized in another welfare state regime (6.3% of fathers have a direct and another 13.5% have an indirect migration background (their fathers were born in another country) covering birth cohorts from the 1970s to the 1990s; total N = 1053). We then add context-related information on their (fathers’ and grandfathers’) countries of origin from the OECD family database and estimate an SEM model to test potential direct and indirect effects. We find that more educated fathers who experienced extended parental leave regulations are more involved fathers today. Our results support, thus, that welfare state conditions influence individuals’ behaviour while education is a relevant moderator in this relationship.
{"title":"Does the (socio-political) socialization context matter for paternal involvement?","authors":"Thomas Eichhorn, Claudia Zerle-Elsäßer","doi":"10.1177/09589287241251993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241251993","url":null,"abstract":"Previous literature on paternal involvement emphasizes the influence of fathers’ socialization contexts, considering either welfare policies (Hipp and Leuze, 2015) or experiences with their own fathers (Brown et al., 2018; Parke, 1995). In this study, we combine those two branches of research and examine how fathers’ and their fathers’ (grandfathers’) socialization experiences (parental leave regulations in their early adulthood as an example of (de-)familization policies (Lohmann and Zagel, 2016)) predict paternal involvement today. To measure paternal involvement, we create an indicator for involvement that covers Lamb et al. (1985) three aspects of direct interaction, responsibility, and availability and the fact that a father has taken paternal leave for at least one of his children or not. We use the fact that a substantial proportion of the fathers in the German, national survey AID:A 2019 (Kuger et al., 2020) were socialized in another welfare state regime (6.3% of fathers have a direct and another 13.5% have an indirect migration background (their fathers were born in another country) covering birth cohorts from the 1970s to the 1990s; total N = 1053). We then add context-related information on their (fathers’ and grandfathers’) countries of origin from the OECD family database and estimate an SEM model to test potential direct and indirect effects. We find that more educated fathers who experienced extended parental leave regulations are more involved fathers today. Our results support, thus, that welfare state conditions influence individuals’ behaviour while education is a relevant moderator in this relationship.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141064100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-16DOI: 10.1177/09589287241251990
Miriam Laschinski
Growing care dependencies among the elderly due to population ageing in Europe challenge the labour-market participation of informal caregivers. While familiarized care regimes incentivize family caregiving by providing many cash-for-care-benefits, resulting in reduced labour supply, defamiliarized care regimes allocate more public spending to care infrastructure, alleviating the care responsibilities placed on family members. At the same time, care provision on the micro-level is distributed unequally across gender, age, and socioeconomic status. The question then emerges: Does the labour-market participation of informal caregivers vary between and within countries depending on the social-expenditure policy of welfare states? To answer this research question, a multilevel design was used, employing SHARE data and macro-indicators from OECD and Eurostat databases. The results reveal higher probabilities of labour-market participation for informal caregivers in general when social expenditures on formal care infrastructure are higher. However, labour-market participation was observed as being unequally distributed among the heterogeneous group of persons with and without caregiving duties. Women and individuals of lower socioeconomic status did not benefit from social expenditures in the same way as their counterparts, leading to lower levels of labour-market participation.
{"title":"Defamilization? Not for everyone. Unequal labour-market participation among informal caregivers in Europe","authors":"Miriam Laschinski","doi":"10.1177/09589287241251990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287241251990","url":null,"abstract":"Growing care dependencies among the elderly due to population ageing in Europe challenge the labour-market participation of informal caregivers. While familiarized care regimes incentivize family caregiving by providing many cash-for-care-benefits, resulting in reduced labour supply, defamiliarized care regimes allocate more public spending to care infrastructure, alleviating the care responsibilities placed on family members. At the same time, care provision on the micro-level is distributed unequally across gender, age, and socioeconomic status. The question then emerges: Does the labour-market participation of informal caregivers vary between and within countries depending on the social-expenditure policy of welfare states? To answer this research question, a multilevel design was used, employing SHARE data and macro-indicators from OECD and Eurostat databases. The results reveal higher probabilities of labour-market participation for informal caregivers in general when social expenditures on formal care infrastructure are higher. However, labour-market participation was observed as being unequally distributed among the heterogeneous group of persons with and without caregiving duties. Women and individuals of lower socioeconomic status did not benefit from social expenditures in the same way as their counterparts, leading to lower levels of labour-market participation.","PeriodicalId":47919,"journal":{"name":"Journal of European Social Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140968263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-04DOI: 10.1177/09589287241245656
Alexander Horn, Sebastian Kohl
Modern welfare states compete with private providers of welfare in offering economic security. This is most evident in the case of pensions competing with life insurance and private pensions as well as of public health insurance competing with private insurance providers. The common view of this public–private relationship is one of a trade-off: longitudinally, political scientists describe how retrenchment was pushed by privatized welfare, whereas economists trace the crowding-out of private to public welfare provisions. Cross-sectionally, they claim that countries have lower public spending levels because they have a large private sector. We suggest a more nuanced view. Drawing on a new long-run panel data of public pension and private life insurance expenditures and contributions in 20 OECD countries since Bismarck to the current day, we show that in the postwar years a cross-sectional trade-off emerged, which then faded. Longitudinally, complementary relationships of public and private provision growth have become the norm. We argue theoretically and show empirically that trade-offs only occur if governments still hold (waning) anti-interventionist and pro-market views.
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