Value coalitions and policy change: The impact of gendered patterns of work, religion and partisanship on childcare policy across German states

Abstract

In recent years, family policies in advanced industrial economies have experienced dynamic change and growth. In contrast to well-established social policies such as pensions and unemployment, which have seen downscaling reforms across Europe, family polices have experienced a trajectory of expansion in the region. Among European countries, Germany, Netherlands and the United Kingdom have been particularly hailed as 'path shifters', for 'devoting considerably greater resources to childcare than in the past' (Morgan, 2013: 73).

Public childcare provision and employment participation of East and West German mothers with different educational backgrounds

“…Previous research demonstrates that childcare take-up is not random, but correlated with individual and household characteristics (e.g., . Additionally, there remains a risk that mothers from counties with varying childcare provision differ significantly in their individual and household characteristics, as differences in the increase of childcare services across Germany are associated with county characteristics such as employment rates and productivity (Andronescu and Carnes, 2015). Although conventional regression models perform even if treatment and control groups differ in their covariate distribution, effect estimates are likely to be biased, particularly when the estimation relies heavily on extrapolation (Stuart, 2010).…”

Public Childcare Expansion and Changing Gender Ideologies of Parents in Germany

“…Our key independent variable was the provision of public childcare places at county level, measured as the annual percentage of children aged under three years who were enrolled in publicly funded childcare services in relation to the total population of this age group. Due to substantial excess demand for childcare places (BMFSFJ, 2015), this may also be interpreted as a measure of childcare supply or availability (Andronescu & Carnes, 2015). The childcare measure included half-day and full-day slots and the observed temporal and the regional variation in the childcare attendance rate in our sample was in line with the overall development of childcare provision (Strunz, 2015).…”

“…However, these average changes mask great regional variation in attendance rates ranging from 14 to 47 percent in West German counties and from 45 to 63 percent across counties in East Germany in 2014 (Strunz, 2015). These regional variations in the development of childcare provision over time are significantly related to the strength of catholic history, trends in maternal employment, and political priorities of specific parties (Andronescu & Carnes, 2015). In this study, we exploit these temporal and regional variations in the childcare expansion to identify short-term effects on parental attitude change over the life course.…”

The partisan politics of early childhood education in the German Länder

“…Compared with the large body of literature on the determinants of welfare state policy more generally, research on family policies and ECEC has developed only recently. It is only since the emergence of the social investment debate in the 1990s and 2000s that public childcare came into the focus of comparative welfare state research (Henninger et al 2008;Lambert 2008;Jensen 2009;Bonoli and Reber 2010;Daly 2010;Leitner 2010;Mätzke and Ostner 2010;Fleckenstein et al 2011;Morgan 2012Morgan , 2013Fleckenstein and Lee 2014;Oliver and Mätzke 2014;Andronescu and Carnes 2015). Proponents of the social investment "paradigm" argue that the welfare state should invest in active labour market policies and education (Esping-Andersen 2002;Bonoli 2012Bonoli , 2013Morel et al 2012).…”