http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/amp/34/10/844.pdf

Family Policy: Government and Families in Fourteen Countries.

Contexts of child rearing: Problems and prospects.

This article focuses on the caring function of the family in child care and elderly care and follows a comparative as well as a gender perspective. It aims at developing a gender-sensitive theoretical concept of familialism which allows to identify real world variations of familialism. Four ideal types of familialism are distinguished and care policies in the EU member states are classified according to them. It can be shown that countries cluster differently for different care policies. In addition, structural gender effects of the four ideal types of familialism are reflected upon. The empirical analysis of paid parental leave in nine EU member states gives an example of gendered and de-gendered variants of familialism.

Varieties of familialism: The caring function of the family in comparative perspective

This article compares 14 OECD countries, as of the middle-to-late 1980s, with respect to their provision of policies that support moth ers' employment: parental leave, child care, and the scheduling of public education. Newly gathered data on 18 policy indicators are pre sented. The indicators are then standardized, weighted, and summed into indices. By differ entiating policies that affect maternal employ ment from family policies more generally, these indices reveal dramatic cross-national differences in policy provisions.The empirical results reveal loose clusters of countries that correspond only partially to prevailing welfare-state typologies. For mothers with preschool-aged children, only five of the 14 countries provided reasonably complete and continuous benefits that sup ported their options for combining paid work with family responsibilities. The pattern of cross-national policy variation changed no tably when policies affecting mothers with older children were examined.The indices provide an ...

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Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States

Comparative social scientists have developed various arguments about the determinants of social policies, especially those connected with twentiethcentury "welfare states." Structure-functionalists argue that the social policies of modern nations necessarily converge due to an underlying logic of industrialism, while neo-Marxists treat such policies as state responses to the social reproduction requirements of advanced capitalism. Yet most students of social policies are more attuned to history and politics. Concentrating on two dozen or fewer industrial capitalist democracies, many scholars have explored the alternative ways in which democratic political processes have helped to create programs and expand social expenditures. For a fuller range of nations past and present, scholars have also asked how ties to the world-economy, patterns of geopolitical competition, and processes of transnational cultural modelling have influenced social policies. Finally, there is now considerable interest in the independent impact of states on social policymaking. States may be sites of autonomous official initiatives, and their institutional structures may help to shape the political processes from which social policies emerge. In turn, social policies, once enacted and implemented, themselves transform politics. Consequently, the study over time of "policy feedbacks" has become one of the most fruitful current areas of research on states and social policies.

Family Policy: Government and Families in Fourteen Countries.

Citations

Contexts of child rearing: Problems and prospects.

Varieties of familialism: The caring function of the family in comparative perspective

Supporting the Employment of Mothers: Policy Variation Across Fourteen Welfare States

States and Social Policies

Mother-Only Families: Problems, Prospects, and Politics.

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