Over the past five decades, dramatic demographic and socio‐economic changes have taken place in East and Southeast Asian countries, with important implications for the family and its future. Still, little is known about the typical configurations of state support for families in these countries. We examine governments’ strategies for supporting families and reducing the cost of children. Employing hierarchical cluster analysis, we uncover four distinctive family policy profiles—maternity support, poverty‐relief support, employment‐oriented support and encompassing support—and discuss their implication for defamilialisation. What appears less clear are the drivers behind such configurations, but there are indications that fertility concerns, the cultural fabric of a country and the productivist profile of the social policy regime seem to influence the orientation of family policy models. Overall, the development of family policy in East and Southeast Asia seems to be fragmented and characterised by parallel interventions of different types of provenance.
Various instruments to protect families with children from the consequences of industrialization have been introduced in modernizing nation-states at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The global adoption of family policies, such as maternity leave, family allowances, and childcare facilities, followed a wide array of patterns. After being introduced by pioneering countries, some programs spread rapidly throughout Europe, some reached the peripheries of colonial empires and others were only introduced by the newly established nation-states populating world society after decolonization. We provide the first analysis of the disparate origins and spread of family policies, identifying the networks that facilitate their diffusion.
This study aims to deepen our understanding of social investment expansion proposing a political learning mechanism to link existing institutional and political explanations. When resources are limited, increased spending in social investment often comes at the expense of politically costly retrenchment of established social insurance policies. Previous studies suggest that this trade-off results in existing entitlements crowding out new policies, and that party ideology plays less of a role in determining social policy expansion. I argue that this is because parties face an electoral dilemma, as individual preferences for social investment and social insurance have been shown to differ between groups that partly overlap in their voting behaviour. Applying a policy diffusion framework to the analysis of childcare expenditure, this study proposes that policymakers learn from the political consequences of past decisions made by their foreign counterparts and update their policy choice accordingly. The econometric analysis of OECD data on childcare expenditure shows that governments tend to make spending decisions that follow those of ideologically similar cabinets abroad and that left-wing governments with a divided electorate tend to reduce childcare expenditure if a previous expansionary decision of a foreign incumbent is followed by an electoral defeat. The findings have implications for the study of the politics of social policy development.
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