This article offers a methodology to reveal the latent constructs which underlie policies on parental leave and childcare services. It is constructed to uncover the state assumptions about social organisation of childcare and gender roles in a country-comparative perspective. Legal regulations are central to this analysis, and combinations of policy components take centre stage. An index of state de-familialism isproposed and its analytical potential tested on eight post-socialist EU states. Grounded in Leitner's (2003) conceptualisation of familialism, it gauges three policy types: (1) Slovenian and Lithuanian supported defamilialism incentivises women's continuous employment and active fatherhood, (2) explicit familialism in Hungary, Czech Republic, and Estonia supports familial childcare and reinforces gendered parenting, and (3) implicit familialism in Poland, Slovakia, and Latvia leaves parents without public support. These groups share core characteristics with developed welfare-state regimes. This methodology has the potential to discredit claims of post-socialist exceptionalism and allows researchers to test new hypotheses.

This article analyses childcare services in six countries, assessing this policy instrument’s potential to facilitate parents’ capabilities for arranging childcare in a way they have reason to value. It draws on Sen’s capability approach to conceptualize and assess childcare policy design across five key aspects of childcare provision (accessibility, availability, affordability, quality and flexibility) in a country-comparative perspective. The conceptualization of the multifaceted nature of childcare provides compelling insights into the complexity of comparing childcare services across countries. The ensuing analysis and comprehensive overview of national policies challenges the idea of a defamilialization policy cluster, which masks key distinctions between public and market service provision. The more nuanced conceptualization and operationalization of childcare policy design through the capability approach reveals parents’ real opportunities for arranging childcare and the varying effects of policy design across gender and class. In addition, it goes beyond implicit commodification assumptions and opens up space for parents’ potential desire for multiple care arrangement possibilities.

This article analyses public parental leave in eight northern European countries, and assesses its opportunity potential to facilitate equal parental involvement and employment, focusing on gender and income opportunity gaps. It draws on Sen's capability and Weber's ideal‐types approach to analyze policies across countries. It offers the ideal parental leave architecture, one which minimizes the policy‐generated gender and class inequality in parents’ opportunities to share parenting and keep their jobs, thus providing real opportunities for different groups of individuals to achieve valued functionings as parents. Five policy indicators are created using benchmarking and graphical analysis. Two sources of opportunity inequality are considered: the leave system as the opportunity and constraint structure, and the socio‐economic contexts as the conversion factors. The article produces a comprehensive overview of national leave policies, visually presenting leave policy across countries. Considering policy capability ramifications beyond gender challenges a family policy‐cluster idea and the Nordic‐Baltic divide. It demonstrates that leave systems in northern Europe are far from homogenous; they diverge in the degree to which they create real opportunities for parents and children as well as in key policy dimensions through which these opportunities are created.

This article explores mechanisms linking family policy to work–family conflict, work demands and gender. The conflict construct has dominated survey-based work–family research; however, both the individual actor and the societal context have been conspicuously absent. In qualitative interviews, including established instruments of work–family conflict, we studied how perceptions of work–family conflict were linked to strategies and use of policy entitlements among working parents in Sweden and Slovenia, two countries with policies promoting the dual-earner family. Our findings imply that such policies contribute to ‘have-it-all’ aspirations, but collide with practical realities, including norms related to work, parenthood and gender. In Sweden, policy tools and work demands appeared more decisive, especially for women’s conflict, whereas in Slovenia, informal care by extended family was important. Based on the analysis, we propose a typology of strategies and perceived conflict that can help develop research on work–family conflict, especially from a comparative perspective.

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Community is a key dimension in the work-family interface as highlighted by the recent Covid-19 pandemic. Yet it is critically understudied by much work-family scholarship. We highlight and address crucial barriers preventing the integration of the community concept, developing an interdisciplinary communitybased capabilities approach. This approach conceptualizes three components of community: local relationships, local policies and locality (place, space and scale). Local relationships include formal and informal relationships, networks, and a sense of belonging. Dependent on the broader socioeconomic context, local policies and services can provide important resources for managing these relationships and work-life situations more generally. These relationships and policies are embedded in specific geographical localities, shaping and being shaped by social action. This interdisciplinary conceptualization of community allows relational, spatial, structural and temporal aspects of community to be integrated into a more broadly applicable conceptual approach. We base this approach on the capability approach, which allows for a pluralistic work-life framework of what individuals value and do. We further argue for a conceptualization of family as community, moving towards a work-community interface. The resulting conceptual approach is useful for explaining work-life processes for individuals with and without care responsibilities, and offers a new framework for studying the social trends intensely and rapidly highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methodological challenges for comparative welfare state research: capturing intracountry variation in cross-national analyses Shortened title: Challenges for comparative welfare state research Acknowledgement Guest editors wish to thank the Advisory Committee Members, Mara A. Yerkes, Dirk Schubotz and Niels Spierings, the reviewers, JCPA editors and all authors for their valuable support. Funding Acknowledgement This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 746168-AGenDA. Any dissemination of results reflects only the author's view and the Commission is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

One key task in the early fight against the COVID-19 pandemic was to plan non-pharmaceutical interventions to reduce the spread of the infection while limiting the burden on the society and economy. With more data on the pandemic being generated, it became possible to model both the infection trends and intervention costs, transforming the creation of an intervention plan into a computational optimization problem. This paper proposes a framework developed to help policy-makers plan the best combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions and to change them over time. We developed a hybrid machine-learning epidemiological model to forecast the infection trends, aggregated the socio-economic costs from literature and expert knowledge, and used a multi-objective optimization algorithm to find and evaluate various intervention plans. The framework is modular and easily adjustable to a real-world situation, it is trained and tested with data collected from almost all countries of the world, and its proposed intervention plans generally outperform those used in real life in terms of both the number of infections and intervention costs.