Rethinking Gender, Work and Care in a New Europe

Theorising Markets and Societies in the Post-Postsocialist Era

Triin Roosalu, Dirk Hofäcker

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137371089
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137371096
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

Given the growing importance of Eastern European countries in the development of the EU, there is an urgent need to reconstruct the recent dynamic developments in women's work and care in these societies, and the socio-political determinants thereof. Considering their specific cultural, economic and historical development, it can be assumed that the trends and determinants of women's labour market trajectories in CEE countries differ significantly from those in the other European countries that have frequently made up the basis for established theories in social and labour market research. This being the case, can 'standard' theoretical approaches, mostly modelled on evidence from Western Europe, be transferred to the analysis of Eastern European countries? This edited collection scrutinises pivotal aspects of women's careers in Eastern Europe, providing a detailed overview of trends and determinants of women's employment in Eastern Europe, and reflecting critically on theoretical approaches in social and labour market research.

Part I

Family Policies, Norms and Discourses

2

Family Policies in Post-Socialist Welfare States: Where Are They Located in the European Worlds of Welfare?

Sonja Blum

Introduction

The situation for women and men in the labour market differs everywhere in Europe, but the nature and the extent of these differences vary significantly between countries – for example, with regard to employment rates, gender-related wage differentials and working hours. First and foremost, these variations have been traced back to country-specific laws and regulations in the fields of labour markets, and social and family policies (Pfarr, 2002: 32). The option to combine paid work and family life has been identified as the primary determinant of women’s labour market participation. This chapter studies these variations across Europe¹ with regard to family policies and tries to identify trends in recent years. Its particular focus is on family policies in the post-socialist welfare states of Central and Eastern Europe.

With regard to female employment, the most important family policy instruments are leave policies and institutional childcare. Daly and Rake (2004: 51) argue: ‘the two measures most telling of how public policies treat care are parental leave, as distinct from maternity, and public childcare facilities’. During the last decade, these two measures have been high on political agendas across Europe, and questions of ‘reconciliation’ and work–family balance have gained importance – for example, against the background of demographic changes and shortages of skilled workers. This can also be seen in countries where family policies have traditionally been directed towards the traditional family and a male breadwinner and female carer model (for example Germany).

However, the post-socialist welfare states have come from very different starting points. They repeatedly reached fundamental junctures and experienced dramatic institutional shifts: before World War II the Central European countries, in particular, were based on a conservative Bismarckian model. Following an employment-centred, universal welfare provision during the socialist era, the restructuring since the 1990s has included both path-dependent and path-shifting decisions. Case studies have shown that all former communist countries – to differing degrees – quit the path of de-familialization and ‘tried to reintroduce the traditional familization regime […] as they move back toward the path of re-familization’ (Saxonberg and Sirovatka, 2006: 186). Esping-Andersen (1999: 45) states that a familialistic welfare regime is ‘one that assigns a maximum of welfare obligations to the household’, while de-familialistic policies lessen individuals’ reliance on the family and support women’s employment.² Some countries implemented implicit negative re-familialization (through welfare state retrenchment and market-liberal policies), and others explicit positive re-familialization (through policies supporting women to leave the labour market to raise their children).

For a long time family policies were neglected within comparative welfare state research, which instead focused on social policies covering traditional social risks, such as pensions or unemployment. Since the first decade of the new millennium, however, this situation has changed in two respects: first, comparative analyses of family policy developments have increased (for example Gauthier, 2002; Bahle, 2008; Szelewa and Polakowski, 2008); and second, and connectedly, family policies – in particular questions of work–family balance, parental leave and childcare services – have gained importance on the political agendas for action in many countries. This increased importance is in many places connected with the need for a reorientation or modernization of traditional policies in this field and, as a result, far-reaching policy changes have been observed (for example Ahrens et al., 2010; Mätzke and Ostner, 2010a).

Against this background of far-reaching changes, it is striking that attempts at identifying family policy typologies seem to have rather declined during recent years. This might apparently run counter to the increased importance of family policies, but can be explained by several developments. Among other things, it could be argued that the first decade of the new millennium has been marked by a general deconstruction of welfare state typologies: following the typology-immanent criticisms of the 1990s – which especially concerned Esping-Andersen’s (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism – many criticisms of the 2000s challenged typologies as such. On the other hand, classifications are valuable for comparative research – to summarize similarities and differences between countries, to produce hypotheses and add to theory building, or to provide a basis for selecting cases to be studied in more detail.

However, what makes us sceptical about using existing family policy typologies is the timeliness of far-reaching family policy reforms. In the face of ongoing welfare state changes and the Eastern enlargement of the EU, comparative welfare state research has been preoccupied with recording, and possibly explaining, developments prior to systematizing them. In a similar way, Mätzke and Ostner (2010b: 468) argue that the focus has shifted from identifying ‘worlds of welfare’ to identifying ‘worlds of welfare reform’. Welfare state typologies (and even more the notion of ‘regimes’) always involved stability, which has been largely absent, particularly since the new millennium. Nonetheless, this (to a large extent legitimate) scepticism has not restrained comparative welfare state research from excessively using existing family policy typologies to account for case selection or to diagnose the family policy situation of countries, for example.

In this chapter, existing family policy typologies will be compared with recent trends of public family policies in Europe. The aim is not to build a new typology, but, rather, to assess the current fit of existing typologies for displaying family policy variations across countries. The chapter specifically looks at the Central and Eastern European (CEE) welfare states and their positions within the European ‘worlds of welfare’ regarding family policies. Attention is also paid to family policy changes after the financial and economic crisis. The chapter follows the question of how the still under-researched CEE welfare states – which are often treated as uniform (Szelewa and Polakowski, 2008: 115) – fit into the traditional ‘worlds of welfare’. Do they share specific characteristics – in this case, in terms of family policies – that distinguish them from the other European welfare states?

To answer these questions, the chapter is structured in the following way. The second section reviews the most important welfare state typologies, which are often applied to family policies, but have also been criticized for neglecting this field. The main specific family policy typologies are then discussed. The third section summarizes three hypotheses on where to place the CEE countries within these ‘worlds of welfare’. In the fourth section, recent developments and trends in family policy expenditure and childcare policies (that is, leave regulations and childcare services) are considered. These developments are contrasted with the prevalent typologies of the respective countries. In the fifth section, the results are summarized and some general conclusions drawn.

Welfare state and family policy typologies

Until the 1980s, comparative welfare state research developed its basic concepts and became increasingly differentiated as a discipline, for example by Marshall’s (1950) work on the expansion from citizens’ rights to social rights, or, each on the development of the welfare state, Flora and Heidenheimer’s (1982) qualitative-historical approaches and Wilensky’s (1975) quantitative comparisons. With Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s (1990) publication of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, the approach of clustering welfare states in order to facilitate systematic comparisons was established as the predominant strand of research.

Traditional worlds of welfare

The innovation of Esping-Andersen’s seminal work was to overcome the customary approach of comparing welfare states by their aggregate social spending. He argued that it is not sufficient to know how much welfare states spend, but for what, how and why. To answer the first and second questions, he analysed social policies in 18 countries and using the three indicators of de-commodification,³ social stratification, and the interplay of state, market and family in social provision. In this way, Esping-Andersen arrived at the well-known typology of the liberal, the conservative and the social-democratic welfare state regime. In reality there will mainly be hybrid forms, but these three ideal types are characterized as follows. Liberal welfare states show low levels of de-commodification, means testing and primacy of the market. Conservative welfare states distinguish themselves by medium de-commodification, earnings-related and status-preserving social security systems, subsidiarity and promotion of traditional family structures. Social-democratic welfare states are marked by high de-commodification, generous and universal benefits, plus a strong focus on solidarity and gender equality.

Despite its being a milestone and making an essential contribution to comparative welfare state research, there have been a range of criticisms of Esping-Andersen’s approach and conclusions. Three important sub-categories of these criticisms can be differentiated⁴: space, time and indicators (see Schubert et al., 2009). On the spatial dimension, one important criticism was that, apart from Italy, the Southern European countries are neglected. While Esping-Andersen seems to assign them into the corporatist-conservative model (for example by a common Catholic imprint and strong familialism), others have argued for the existence of a specific Southern (Ferrera, 1996) or Mediterranean welfare regime (see Arts and Gelissen, 2002: 142). Outside Europe, Castles (1998), for example, criticized the placing of Australia and New Zealand within the liberal model and instead argued for the existence of a specific Antipodean model, characterized by high thresh-olds for means-tested benefits. More generally speaking, Esping-Andersen included 18 countries in his analysis: 13 European, and 11 of them EU member states today. What this means is that when using this typology today, there are a lot of blind spots on the map of European welfare systems. This is particularly the case since the Eastern enlargement of the EU, with the post-socialist welfare systems still often under-represented, in comparative research.

With regard to developments over time, welfare state research has delineated the mid-1970s as the end of the welfare state’s ‘golden age’, and from then on identified fundamental changes, namely retrenchment, re-commodification and recalibration⁵ (Pierson, 2001). Since the mid-1990s, these developments have been linked to the question of what the consequences are over time for individual welfare states and, in comparison, for European welfare states. At the national level, debates have ranged from path-dependency of (different) welfare policies on the one hand, to system changes on the other (for example Clasen, 2005; Ebbinghaus, 2005). In comparative research, some researchers diagnose welfare state convergence, while others discern path-dependency/stability or even divergence of welfare systems (Seeleib-Kaiser, 1999; Alber and Standing, 2000; Starke et al., 2008). Esping-Andersen’s (and other) typologies are criticized for being static concepts, which do not provide for these dynamics.

With regard to Esping-Andersen’s indicators, the most important is the so-called feminist criticism, which is that, generally, gender-specific problems of welfare states and the family’s role in welfare provision are neglected, and specifically the de-commodification index is ‘gender-blind’ (for example Orloff, 1993; O’Connor, 1996). Consequently, alternative typologies⁶ were developed which focus on these aspects (for example Sainsbury, 1999; Daly and Lewis, 2000). In a famous typology, Lewis and Ostner (1994), looking at mothers’ employment, individual social security for women, and public care services for children and the elderly, identified three groups of countries: strong, moderate and weak male breadwinner models. Their grouping differs substantially from Esping-Andersen’s: for example, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands are all considered strong breadwinner models, while France and Belgium are classified as moderate, and Sweden as a weak breadwinner model. In another typology, Korpi (2000) studies the degree to which gender equality is supported or constrained by different institutions, and arrives at three categories (see Hiilamo, 2002: 152): general family support models (for example Germany, France) aim to strengthen the man’s breadwinning position, for example through family cash and tax benefits; in market-oriented models (for example the US), family policies are undeveloped and the division of family/waged work is market-regulated; dual-earner support models (for example Sweden, Finland) strengthen the labour market participation of both parents, for example through public care services or paid parental leave for parents of small children.

Traditional family policy systems

Against the background of these criticisms of Esping-Andersen’s ‘three worlds’ and novel typologies (for example the male breadwinner models), it is debatable to what extent typologies can be developed and be valid for welfare systems in general. It often seems more adequate to construct country groups for different policy areas. So, the question is: what do the typologies of ‘European family policy systems’ look like? It has been shown how clusters differ according to the indicators used (Bazant and Schubert, 2009). This also becomes apparent in the numerous attempts to construct family policy models for systematic comparisons, which will now be looked at in more detail.

In an early typology, Kamerman and Kahn (1978) examined family policy-making styles and identified three models: explicit and comprehensive (for example Sweden, France, Hungary), sectoral (for example Austria, Germany, Poland) and implicit and reluctant (for example the UK, the US). Gauthier (1996), in her historical analysis of family policy traditions in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries, identified four groups: the pro-egalitarian model (for example Sweden, Denmark), which fosters parallel reconciliation of family and paid employment for both parents by high state support and liberal attitudes towards different f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• European Science Foundation
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Family Policies, Norms and Discourses
• Part II: Participation in the Labour Market
• Part III: Combining Parenthood and Paid Work
• Part IV: Occupational and Social Mobility
• Index