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In recent years, the degree of choice in education systems has increased in most countries. Still, the variation of choice policies across countries is substantial. The authors ask under what combinations of conditions (i.e. institutional features of education systems) choice policy succeeds in balancing educational efficiency and equity. Using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, they investigate the impact of seven institutional conditions in 20 European countries. Those seven conditions are identified in school choice literature as relevant in explaining variations in educational efficiency and equity. The analysis shows that there are multiple causal paths to good policy outcome. The main contribution of this article is to show that 'choice' is an INUS condition (i.e. an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient combination of conditions) and that 'no tracking' is a necessary condition for educational efficiency and equity. In addition, the authors show that 'good management' and 'competition' of schools contribute to good educational outcomes only in choicetolerant countries.

The chapter departs from the assumption that today’s social investment (SI) reforms need to be understood against the countries’ policy legacies. It traces the development of SI policies in three Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) from restoration of independence in the 1990s until the late 2010s and explores policy responses to recalibrate the former communist welfare regime into a competitive, skill-focused model. By analyzing SI reform efforts in education, family policy, and the labor market the study demonstrates that the same legacies had different impacts on different social policy fields, inter alia distorting the political discourse and strategies of reforms. This facilitated the skill creation–oriented inclusive distributional profile in education but less intense and more stratified profiles in other policy areas. Although the three countries share many common legacies (such as a Soviet communist past) and contemporary characteristics (such as developing an Anglo-Saxon prototype of the welfare regime), there are important cross-country differences in priorities and agility of SI reforms. The interplay of government composition and nation-building discourse intervened with the politics of reform and resulted ultimately in a more agile reform trajectory in Estonia and Latvia compared to mono-ethnic Lithuania. The chapter concludes that legitimizing radical reforms through nation-building turns out to be a more important factor in reform agility than ideologically favorable coalitions.

The ability to produce desired outcomes represents an important basis of the legitimacy of social policies. Nonetheless, policy outcomes have not systematically figured in the analysis of childcare regimes despite growing political interest in issues such as female employment, gender wage gap and men's involvement in childcare. In this article, we use fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the relationship between the configuration of policy instruments, attitudes toward childcare and outcomes in 21 European countries. Our results show that there is only one mix of policy instruments consistently linked with positive gender equality outcomes and this route has the quality of the universal caregiver model. It also demonstrates that both a combination of policy instruments and favourable attitudinal factors are necessary to produce desirable outcomes in the gender division of paid work and unpaid childcare.