European countries show substantial variation in family policy and in the extent to which policies support more traditional male‐breadwinner or more gender egalitarian earner–carer family arrangements. Using data from the European Social Survey, the authors implemented multilevel models to analyze variation in fertility intentions of 16,000 men and women according to individual‐level characteristics and family policy across 21 European countries. Both traditional and earner–carer family support generosity were positively related to first‐birth intentions for men and women. In contrast, only earner–carer support maintains its positive relationship with second birth intentions. Family policy is not in general related to third and higher order parity intentions.
Following the 2006 election, the Swedish earner-carer model of family policy seems to have come to an important crossroads, and questions have been raised about the future course of policies. Will the prototypical earner-carer model in Sweden persist? The separate reforms in cash transfers, services, and tax systems in several respects seem to point in contradictory directions, simultaneously introducing new principles of social care. In this article, past and present reforms and potential outcomes of policies are discussed from an institutional and comparative perspective. Reviewing research on outcomes of earner-carer policies for gendered patterns of productive and reproductive work, class-based stratification, child well-being, fertility, and work-family conflict, the article also contributes to the discussion about future challenges for family policy institutions in Sweden and other advanced welfare states.
This study analyses the links between family policy institutions and poverty in households with pre-school children in 21 old and new welfare democracies. New institutional information which enables a separation of different family policy dimensions is combined with micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study. Through statistical multilevel modelling, individual-and country-level data are combined in a simultaneous analysis of their relationships to child poverty risks. The results show that family policy transfers are related to lower child poverty risks at the micro level. However, the mechanisms by which such transfers reduce poverty vary by type of family support. Support to dual-earner families operates by enabling both parents to work and raise market income, while support to more traditional family structures in some instances has a more direct effect on poverty risks. The analysis also renders support to the hypothesis that dual-earner transfers also alleviate poverty most effectively among single-mother households.
Welfare state regimes vary in their strategies of redistribution. Some welfare states have extensive taxable social insurance schemes, while others rely more on non-taxable means-tested benefits. In order to assess the distributive effects of different programme types, it is necessary to analyse social insurance after taxes, something rarely practised in comparative research. In this paper, we evaluate distributive effects of social insurance after taking taxes into account in 10 welfare states. The main question is to what extent income taxes affect the contribution of social insurance to income inequality. The conclusion is that taxation may have important consequences for both inter- and intra-country comparisons of income redistribution, especially if countries with similar social policy systems are compared. The analyses are based on micro-level income data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS).
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