In many European welfare states in the last decades, the state provision of social care services has increased, in part even in spite of retrenchment policies in other areas of state welfare policies. Informal childcare has, however, survived everywhere in Europe, until today a substantial proportion of care is provided informally in the family. The degree to which informal care has been formalised, and the social rights and state provision in relation to formal and informal care, differ substantially in comparison of European societies. In comparative social policy analyses, the explanatory framework is often based on a kind of evolutionary approach. According to this argument, the degree of formalisation of informal care is determined by the degree to which welfare states support gender equality and the labour market integration of women. It is argued here that such explanatory framework is not sufficient. It is not taken into consideration that informal care has itself been modernised: and that the promotion of informal family care does not necessarily contradict ideas about gender equality. Within Western Europe, with respect to the role of informal care, at least two different development paths can be distinguished. Differences with respect to the underlying family values contribute considerably to the explanation of such differences. The quality of social rights in relation to informal care, on the other hand, varies according to the welfare regime and the underlying welfare values.
1 Introduction
In a considerable number of European societies in the decades after World War II, the task of childcare and elderly care were mainly organised as informal care outside the employment system, mainly provided by female caregivers inside family. This was often connected with marginalisation of women in relation to formal employment and the social security system.
This has changed in part until the end of the twentieth century. Women have been integrated into European labour markets to a higher degree and in part in more equal positions, even though everywhere more or less a vertical segregation of labour markets exists in favour of men. At the same time the tasks of care for children and elderly people have been to a considerable part formalised by transfers from the family to other institutions like the public sector, the non-profit sector or the markets. As an employment sector, the social service sector is one of the most prospering economical sectors in many European countries (OECD 2001). European welfare states had an important impact on these changes. In many European countries in the last decades, the state provision of social care services has increased, in part even in spite of retrenchment policies in other areas of welfare state policies; though the public provision of social care services is often still a contested policy area.
Informal care has however survived everywhere in Europe. Until today a substantial proportion of care is provided informally in the family. With respect to the degree to which informal work has been formalised, there are considerable differences between European societies (for example, Rostgaard 2003; Anttonen and Sipilä 2005; Daune-Richard 2005). Such differences are often attributed to differences in relation to welfare states what concerns their efforts to support women's labour force participation and gender equality. However, the approaches of international comparative research in policies of welfare states towards informal care show, in my opinion, specific limitations on the theoretical level. It is not adequately taken into consideration that informal care itself has been modernised, and that the promotion of informal family care does not necessarily contradict to ideas about gender equality.
In this article, I will use a cross-national analysis of 8 European countries to show how the development of care policies of different welfare states is embedded in different development paths of cultural values in relation to informal care. I argue that, in those countries in which informal care still today plays a substantial role and is supported by welfare state policies, this is not necessarily caused by a traditional and backward oriented welfare state policy which hinders the formalisation of social care. Instead, in a specific development path, the care policies of the welfare states reflect that informal care plays an important role also in the modernised cultural concept of the family and of gender equality. In such cases it is no longer seen as an element of the housewife model of the family but more as temporary stage in an otherwise employment centred life course of parents. In these cases the development of new social rights which are connected to informal care, besides social rights connected to public care provision, are of substantial importance for a ‘progressive’ care policy.
Part 2 is a critical discussion of current theoretical approaches to an international comparison of care policies of welfare states. Part 3 presents a theoretical framework which permits the change in these policies to be analysed and explained in a cultural context. Against this background Part 4 analyses the changes in policy towards informal care of several European welfare states in the 1980s and 90s, which changes, I shall argue, proceeded along two clearly differing lines or paths. Part 4 offers some brief conclusions.
2 Theoretical Approaches to a Comparative Analysis of Care Policies of European Welfare States
An important impetus for international comparative analysis of welfare state policies was given by works of the Scandinavian author Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999). His analysis focussed on how varying types of welfare state policy result in different forms of social inequality, and on that basis he distinguished between the social-democratic, the conservative and the liberal types of welfare regime. In this, he drew connections between assumptions about how welfare states influence the structure of social inequality among groups of employed people, with assumptions about their impact on the family. How he connects the two aspects is briefly sketched as follows. The quality of the social rights formed on the basis of differing cultural ideals in each case, is determinant for the social structuring in the relations between different social groups of employed people.1 In the social-democratic welfare regime social rights, based on cultural principles of egalitarianism and solidarity, are correspondingly universally posited and of high quality. Its policies tend to try to achieve the levelling of social hierarchies. The liberal welfare regime in comparison is based on neo-liberal ideas about individual responsibility and a largely laissez-faire state policy towards markets; consequently social rights are comparatively low quality, which tends to cause socio-structural polarisation among groups of the employed. Finally, the conservative welfare regime tries with its policies to reproduce the existing hierarchical structure of social inequality among groups of the employed; here, social rights are of medium quality and essentially limited to employed people. These differences, Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) argues, go hand in hand with specific differences in the way in which the state intervenes in the labour-market and in the family, and also, especially, with respect to the extent in which it promotes the formalisation of care. Thus in the social-democratic welfare regime women tend to be fully integrated into employed activity, on the basis of a strongly developed state social service sector and a comprehensive formalisation of informal care. Conservative welfare regimes promote, rather than the participation of women in employment, unpaid informal care in the family instead, based on financial transfers; liberal welfare states tend to produce high levels of women's employment, made possible by childcare services offered on the market and accessible practically only to the middle classes.
Esping-Andersen's approach contains important starting points for the explanation of the differences in care policies of welfare states, and today still forms a central theoretical framework for international comparative social-policy research. Its assumptions however, about the way in which the regime types and care policies of welfare states are related, have shown themselves to be problematic. For care policies are no longer adequately described by Esping-Andersen's concept which he has outlined more in his works (1990, 1999). Care policies did never and actually do not vary systematically with the type of welfare regime, and partially their differences relate in another way to the regime types. For example Norway, whose welfare state Esping-Andersen classified as social-democratic, for a long time was characterised by relatively low levels of women's employment (Ellingsaeter 1999; Leira 1992, 2002). Conversely, France shows a traditionally high state support of women's employment by the welfare state (Daune-Richard 1998), though its welfare state is characterised as a ‘conservative welfare regime’, and correspondingly, the employment level for women should be rather low. Moreover, in Germany, after substantial change of family structures, the welfare state also has extended public childcare provision to a substantial degree. Therefore, the care policies are no longer adequately described by Esping-Andersen's description of a ‘conservative’ welfare regime (Pfau-Effinger 2004a).
In feminist social policy analyses, various approaches have been developed which have classified welfare states according to their care policies. What should be particularly mentioned here is the approach of Jane Lewis in which she differentiated between weak, moderate and strong male breadwinner states (i.e. Lewis 1992, 1999; Lewis and Ostner 1994). Also, changes in the social policies towards ‘care’ have been analysed (for example, Siim 2000; Lewis 2002; Rostgaard 2002; Meyer 2004). However, less effort has been placed to develop an explanatory framework for cross-national analyses. Often, in the cross-national research on care policies, a kind of evolutionary approach is prevailing according state policies towards the formalisation of informal care is a dependent variable of state policies towards gender equality and labour force integration of women. The main argument is that the more efforts are put in the promotion of gender equality by the welfare state, the higher is the degree of formalisation of care. According to this type of argument, a relatively high proportion of informal care in a country indicates a more ‘traditional’ welfare state which is lagging behind the more advanced ‘women-friendly’ welfare states which substantially support the integration of women into employment by a high provision of public, formalised care (for example, Siim 2000). In as far as approaches to this have been elaborated, mainly the strength of the Women's Movement as an important factor (e.g., Mósesdóttir 1999; Siim 2000).
However, this explanatory framework is not sufficient. It does not take account the fact that informal care is not on the way to die out but has itself been modernised.2 Informal care is no longer connected with the housewife model of the family and the social exclusion of the housewife from the labour market. Instead, it is more often part of a temporary life stage in a life course, which is otherwise characterised by integration into waged work. The forms in which it is provided here have also changed, however. New patterns of social care have been established by new combinations of waged work with informal care in the family during the life course, like part-time work and periods of parental leave. Moreover, also within the family in part new forms of the gender division of care responsibilities have developed. In general, a new type of home-caring parent has emerged, treating home-care as a transitional stage of the life course, with new patterns of sequential or actual combinations of formal employment and informal care. These patterns are also supported by welfare states. In part, also the social rights of parents who care at home were extended (Knijn and Kremer 1997; Geissler and Pfau-Effinger 2005). Parental leave schemes were for example introduced which are often connected with childcare allowances and social security, and which created new options for caring parents during the leave to keep their work contract and which guarantee the right to labour market integration after the end of the leave (Knijn and Kremer 1997).
Though the results were sometimes also contradictory, for in most countries women still are the main providers of informal care, men were not to an equal degree integrated into the family as carers. Accordingly, a gender segregation of labour markets in favour of men has survived in many countries (Rubery et al. 2001).
It is possible to distinguish very roughly at least two different development paths of care arrangements in Western European countries in which informal care plays a differing role, also in the cultural concepts in relation to gender equality. The first is based on a – traditionally – relatively modest role of informal care in the dominant family models, whereas the second is based on a – traditionally – relatively high importance which is attributed to informal family care and on a modernisation of the dominant family model where in the modernised version elements of the ‘home caring society’ have survived and informal family care is still given an important role, even in cultural concepts of gender equality.
3 Comparison of Care Policies in the Context of European Societies
I propose broadening the theoretical framework for the international comparative study of welfare state policy towards care, on the premise that welfare state policy stands in a particular mutual relationship to the cultural and structural dimensions, to other institutions, and to the actions of the social actors in the given ‘care arrangement’ (see Pfau-Effinger 2004a,b).
The theoretical approach of the ‘care arrangement’
The theoretical approach of the ‘care arrangement’ is here briefly sketched as follows. The care arrangement is an interrelation between the cultural values about care, the relevant sense-constructions in a given society surrounding informal and formal care, and the way institutions like the welfare state, the family, the labour market and the non-profit sector as well as social structures frame informal and formal care (see Figure 1).
It is presumed that in every modern society there is at least one such care arrangement, based on the given dominating values and cultural images surrounding formal and informal care, and with time it is either reproduced or changed by the relevant social actors through the process of ongoing conflict, discourse, negotiation and compromise. The influence of cultural values appears on various societal levels: in the social structures and societal institutions, in public discourse between the collective actors as well as among individuals, in their orientations and values. In emphasizing the mutual relations between cultural, institutional and structural levels and the actions of the social actors, I am referring to theoretical premises of Max Weber, David Lockwood (1964) and Margaret Archer (1995), in which the conceptualisation of these interrelations is considered the basis for analysing social change. The respective care arrangement, and its history, overlaps in specific ways with the gender arrangement (Pfau-Effinger 1999, 2004a) and the welfare regime (Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999) of the specific society.
A care arrangement can be firmly established and coherent in the long term if its cultural foundations are anchored as norms on the level of societal institutions, and form the basis of the social actors’ behaviour. It can of course happen, as a result of general processes of social and cultural change, that the degree of cultural and social integration of the care arrangement declines, and then the possibilities for social or cultural change in the arrangement increase. A transformation occurs mainly when contradictions in the arrangement are seized upon by certain social actors who try to bring about change. The care arrangement can in that case become the object of conflict and negotiation processes over innovative cultural models or new institutional arrangements. A particular driving force in the care arrangement transformation of the second half of the twentieth century was the role of the Women's Movement and women's organisations, who made social care a central issue of gender equality, and demanded for a higher degree of public provision of childcare. Also relevant was change in the social practices of large groups of unorganised women, the ‘primary actors’ after Margaret Archer (1995; Pfau-Effinger 2004a).
New arrangements after transformation are not necessarily based on completely new models, values and institutional requirements, but rather still contain elements of the old models and institutions. Usually the transformation proceeds therefore generally ‘path-dependent’, where both historical continuities and breaks with tradition determine the further progress of the change. This is because the social actors in the process are still behaving under the effect of the structures and models they have betrayed. The direction of the transformation is thus not predetermined, but since generally elements of continuity are at work, not free either (Pfau-Effinger 2005).
Welfare state policies towards childcare in the framework of the care arrangement.
Welfare state policies towards childcare in the framework of the care arrangement.
Welfare policies towards care within a care arrangement are mainly based on two types of values:
family values: cultural values and notions with respect to the structure of the family and the gender division of labour,
welfare values: cultural values and notions with respect to the main sphere for the provision of welfare in society.
In former publications I have developed a classification of different cultural models about the family and the way it is related with gender and care (Pfau-Effinger 1998, 1999, 2004a). Accordingly, the following family models can be distinguished in the development in Western Europe, which were significant for the development of care policy in the last decades since the middle of the twentieth century.
the family economy model, which was and is mainly spread in agrarian and craft families in which care was not well developed as a specific task, allocated to specific persons and needing specific skills,
the housewife model of the male breadwinner family in which care was seen as the specific task of the housewife which did not need specific skills but was seen as based on quasi natural skills,
the male breadwinner/female part-time carer model which is based on the idea that the family, and particularly women inside the family, should share the task of caring with other institutions outside the family like the welfare state, the market or the non-profit sector,
the dual breadwinner/external model which is based on the assumption that care should mainly be provided by institutions outside the family, like the welfare state, the market or the non-profit sector,
the dual breadwinner/dual carer model, which is based on the assumption that women and men who equally share the tasks of caring inside the family should share this with other institutions outside the family like the welfare state, the market or the non-profit sector.
Policies of welfare states towards formal and informal care, and their paths of development can, I would argue, be comparatively analysed and typed on the basis of the given cultural values in relation to the family and care upon which they rest. It should be noted that the ways in which welfare state policies are interrelated with such cultural ideas can differ in the time-space context, and the relation can be orderly or display discrepancies and delays. The way, in which new cultural models, having developed at a given time in the population, are dealt with at the governmental level, is strongly influenced by the conflict and negotiation processes taking place in the arena of the social actors.
The differences between the main cultural values about the family and care to which the given welfare state policy ultimately refers is an important basis for explaining why these policies vary on the international scale. Welfare values on the other hand are relevant for the question of which institution is seen as mainly responsible if care is provided outside the family, and they are also related to the degree of generosity of welfare state provision and social rights.
4 Comparative Analysis of Welfare State Policies in a Cultural Context on the Basis of Eight Country Studies
In the following the theoretical framework outlined above will be used to analyse processes of policy transformation in European welfare states in the 1980s and 1990s. Eight countries will be considered on the basis of comparative case studies: Sweden, Finland, Norway, France, The Netherlands, Great Britain and Western Germany,4,5 My central thesis is that cultural differences are an important factor understanding the varying paths of development of care policy.6 Care policy can be explained in the context of the developmental path of the cultural basis of the family on the one hand, and of the cultural basis of the given welfare regime on the other. In this the idea of Esping-Andersen (1990) is taken up, after which the welfare regimes can be understood as different types of welfare state arrangements based in each case on the specific cultural foundations of social integration. This proposal is in some respects a further development of an approach which was developed by Duncan (1998) and which the author called the ‘genderfare-model’. In his model, the author pairs the given welfare states with family-models by using the results of empirical cross-national research.7
First, the evolution during the latter half of the twentieth century of the cultural basis of care arrangements with respect to the family values in each of the countries studied will be examined.
4.1 Change in the cultural basis of the care arrangement
The care arrangements of the countries studied changed during the post-war period along two differing cultural paths of development in relation to family values.
The first path of development: Modernisation of the male breadwinner model of the family
The first path of development is characterised by a fundamental cultural transformation, and exhibits a relatively high degree of dynamic change. It appears in Great Britain, Norway, The Netherlands and Western Germany, where long into the post war period the housewife-model of the male breadwinner family maintained strong cultural predominance.8
This latter model is based on the premise of a fundamental separation of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and a corollary location for both genders: the husband's proper work is in the ‘public’ sphere, while the housewife is responsible for the private household and childcare; her financial security exists on the basis of the husband's income. This model also is linked with the cultural construction of ‘childhood’, after which children need special care and comprehensive individual tutelage of the mother in the private household.
In the above countries a process continuing from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s considerably weakened the central position of the traditional family model as the cultural basis for the care arrangement. This transformation, which generally had already begun in the 1960s, was initiated principally when a fundamental contradiction at the cultural level had come to a head: essentially, the contradiction between the cultural construct of autonomous and equal citizens of modern industrial societies on the one hand, and the cultural construct of the inequality and dependence of the housewife-model on the other. Besides this, there were also alternative family models available on the cultural level; these had filtered down from the new, international feminist discourse into the feminist discussion taking place at the respective national level. Particularly significant was that these contradictions were seized upon by newly forming feminist movements (Pfau-Effinger 2004a). The old family economy model as dominant cultural image was increasingly replaced by the ‘male breadwinner/female part-time carer model’ of the family.9 This model rests essentially on the vision of full integration of women and men into paid economic activity. In it, however, it is expected that women, as mothers, may interrupt their gainful activity for a few years, after which they combine employment and responsibility for childcare through part-time work, until their children are no longer considered to require particular care. As for example findings of a representative attitude survey which was conducted by the Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung 2001 show, also at the beginning of the twenty-first century the most popular cultural model of the family in West Germany is based on the marriage of a male breadwinner and a female part-time carer (Engelbrech and Jungkunst 2001). About two-thirds of all respondents opted for this model. The housewife model with one partner full-time employed, the other not employed was supported by about 14 per cent, whereas only a rather small group opted for one of the family models which are based on an equal share of women and men in waged work (7 per cent for both partners full-time, 7 per cent for both partners half-time, see Engelbrech and Jungkunst 2001)
This change went further still in The Netherlands and Norway, where an egalitarian ‘dual breadwinner/dual carer model’ became established and increasingly gained importance. In this model it is considered desirable that both parents be employed part-time and share a part of the childcare between themselves, while entrusting the other part to an institution outside the family.10 The findings of a representative survey (conducted in 1999 and 2002) by the SCP (Social een Cultureel Planbuereau 2002) for example are very illuminating concerning the actual development of the cultural basis of the care arrangement in The Netherlands. Adults with partners and mothers with children aged between 9 and 12 were asked which forms of labour force participation they prefer to themselves and their partners. In general it is obvious that the majority of women (63 per cent) and men (68 per cent) preferred an egalitarian model. The most popular one was the ‘half-and-half breadwinner’ model where both partners work part-time.
The new cultural models for family and gender relations are characterised in all four countries by the expectation that the mother should be employed, but also by the idea that the ‘private’ childhood should still play an important role in family life.
As an effect of these transformations in the care arrangements in these countries, the structures of the gender division of labour have also changed considerably. The employment activity of mothers has broadened greatly, usually taking place as a sequence of employment interruptions and part-time work (Fagan et al. 1999). The countries in this group are among those in which the percentage of women who work part-time for family reasons at the end of the 1990s was highest in a EU comparison (for The Netherlands 37 per cent, Great Britain and Germany each 24 per cent). It is characteristic of part-time work in these countries that in general it has the extent of half-day employment, or just somewhat less, in terms of time. Correspondingly in these countries the amount of care, which takes place at home, was near the top in European comparison in the late 1990s (European Commission 1998: 12).
The changed value-orientations in The Netherlands and Norway, where the cultural construct of ‘fatherhood’ was part of the general transformation, have up to now been put into actual social practice by far more women than men; at that level therefore the tendency of the male breadwinner/female part-time carer model of the family is still dominant, although in The Netherlands in the meantime an increasing number of fathers of small children work part-time (Plantenga 2003).
The cultural change in the care arrangement was interrelated with general processes of cultural change; this has led to a positive reassessment of the value of individual autonomy (Beck 1992). Thus the new care arrangement model based on a ‘modernized breadwinner model’ has some definitely contradictory aspects, e.g., the financial dependence taken on by a woman who cares for her own children, collides with the high cultural esteem enjoyed by autonomous financial security. This is a possible point of departure for further cultural change.
Second path of development: the dual breadwinner family model
In societies where the care arrangement in recent years has changed along the second path of development – that is, in France, Denmark, Sweden and Finland – the ‘dual breadwinner/external childcare model’ is actually dominant and was already predominant by the beginning of the period studied.11 The model posits that, as a principle, all women as well as men can be full-time employed, and that childcare is essentially the responsibility of institutions outside of the family. In the above countries the state is seen as primarily responsible for organizing access to these services.12 Today this model is the framework for the social practice of women and men and the structure of the gender division of labour in these countries. These countries traditionally already had above-average full-time employment levels for women (OECD 2000), and the number of women who work only part-time for family reasons is generally low (in Denmark 6 per cent, France 7 per cent at the end of the 1990s (European Commission 1998: 12). Although the number of part-time working mothers in Sweden was clearly greater, the part-time jobs here usually have a high number of hours and tend to resemble full-time positions with somewhat fewer hours (Daune-Richard 1998, 2005).
Differences also exist among these countries with respect to the extent of the egalitarian character of the new family model. In France the dominant model assigns the responsibility for informal care work unilaterally to the woman (Hantrais 1996; Daune-Richard 1998, 2005; Fagnani and Letablier 2005).13 The Finnish, Swedish and Danish family models by contrast result from an egalitarian cultural image of the family, after which couples should equally divide family responsibilities – even if structures relating to the gender division of labour in families are partially still far from this ideal (Anttonen 1997; Gordon and Kauppinen 1997; Daune-Richard 1998; Eydal 2005; Lewis 1998; Siim 2000). According to a representative attitude survey by the Statistical Office of Finland 1998 for example, it is a self-evident fact from the perspective of most Finns that ‘married women have the full right to work whatever their family situation’, 91 percent of Finnish women and 88 per cent of men agreed with this statement. The male breadwinner role of men, which is still rather common in West Germany for example, in contrast, is not very popular: the great majority of women (74 per cent) do not support this role model, whereas the proportion of men who object to this model is not nearly as high (60 percent) (Melkas 2002: 11).
The change in the cultural foundations of the care arrangement was in these countries clearly less apparent than in those, which followed the first path of development. In general one can say that where this model by the early 1980s had begun to be established as a more or less egalitarian model, as in Finland, Denmark and Sweden, the egalitarian ideals have in the meantime become permanent practice. In France it was apparently above all women who developed the stronger egalitarian ideals, especially with regard to the household division of labour. These ideals are however even today still contested in French society; apparently also among different social groups there are marked differences of opinion about whether it be desirable to enhance the societal standing of motherhood, or, encourage the partner-based division of family tasks (Daune-Richard 1998; Veil 1997, 2000).
To conclude: West-European care arrangements have by and large changed along two different cultural paths, and these differ fundamentally according to the cultural situation found in different countries after the Second World War. Important cultural differences exist today surrounding the value of informal family childcare by the mother or both parents and question of whether mothers should work part or full-time.
4.2 The transformation of welfare state care policies
To understand the evolution of welfare state policies towards informal care, it is fundamentally important to analyse them within the context of the particular path of development of the respective care arrangement and the underlying family values on one hand, in the context of differing welfare regimes and the underlying welfare values on the other.
First path of development: care policies in the context of the cultural modernisation of the male breadwinner model
Traditionally welfare states whose policies rested on the housewife model of the male breadwinner model incorporated men as individual citizens and employees who could pay into their social insurance system. Married women by contrast were included only as family members, i.e. as wives and mothers.
The welfare states of societies where development can be characterised as ‘modernisation of the male breadwinner family model’ were confronted with specific new demands by cultural and structural changes in the family and gender division of labour of the last two decades of the twentieth century. A number of socio-political measures enacted by these welfare states in the last 15 years can be seen as attempts to adjust to the new challenges – although some are thoroughly contradictory to that end. And along this path of development, the policies of the different welfare states also vary, being dependent on the given welfare regime and its cultural foundations.
The British welfare state is organised after the liberal welfare regime type; the responsibility for childcare is considered essentially a private matter within the family, and public childcare services have hardly been developed (Daycare Trust 1999; Siim 2005). As Jane Lewis has argued, the policies of the British welfare state are based on the (unrealistic) assumption that all adults follow the pattern of life-long full-time employment according to the ‘adult worker model’ (Lewis 2003). The insufficient provision of public, affordable childcare began to be publicly discussed as a social problem in the latter 1990s (Daycare Trust 1999). The European Commission has strongly supported the demand for the expansion of state childcare facilities there, and meanwhile the Blair government has undertaken a moderate broadening of the services on offer (Meyer and Pfau-Effinger 2005). Nevertheless, Great Britain is still among EU members with a particularly low level of state support for childcare (Lewis 2002; Daune-Richard 2005). Job leave possibilities for parents who take over childcare are limited to the relatively short period of maternal leave, only partly paid, and not accessible to all women (Daune-Richard 1998). Therefore essentially only the financial dependency of the male breadwinner can enable mothers to practice the ‘male breadwinner/female part-time carer model’. In light of such a state policy, the ideal of realizing compatibility between family tasks and employment for women is especially problematic and rife with contradiction (Dingeldey 2000; Lewis 2002).
In the ‘conservative’ West German welfare state by comparison, halting attempts at a transformation of care policies are visible: employment of women is generally promoted, and the public provision of childcare was substantially expanded (Esch and Stöber-Blossey 2002). Also, at the end of the 1990s social security for part-time work was improved by fully including all employment types within social security insurance coverage. Also, in the middle 1990s an individual social right to kindergarten for children between three and six years was introduced, even though only as part-time care, as long as parents did not apply for full-time care. Regulations for parents’ leave, existing since the middle 1980s, made it possible for parents who take leave for childcare – as a rule, women – to keep their earlier jobs. Forms of payment for home childcare by parents were also introduced. However, the low amounts of children's benefit allowances and the fact that they are paid only to low-income families assured that the principle of financial dependence of mother-carers upon their ‘male breadwinners’ was not fundamentally changed. Finally, time spent on child care is, though to a limited extent, to be taken into the calculation basis for pension claims (Meyer and Pfau-Effinger 2005; Veil 2003). An important element in re-structuring individual social security is the new parental leave law in power since 2001, which allows the possibility of combining parental leave with part-time work of up to 30 hours. Nevertheless the German welfare state still largely reckons with the predominance of informal family childcare as a main source of childcare provision, particularly for children under three years. Policy is still based more on income-transfers to families than on an extensive offer of social care services, and more still on the material and social security of mothers in the framework of the male breadwinner model, than on individual social rights of those who care for their children at home (Geissler 1997; Ostner 1999; Dingeldey 2000). Because of discontinuities and contradictions in cultural and political developments, West German women up until now have been often unable, or only incompletely and with risks to their social security, to put the new gender-cultural models into social practice.
The greatest progress in restructuring family policy in the direction of individualised, egalitarian dual breadwinner models with partner-shared childcare show the two welfare states of the social-democratic type after Esping-Andersen, i.e. The Netherlands and Norway, even if these countries reacted only with considerable delay to the cultural transformation (Plantenga 1996; Ellingsaeter 1999; Waerness 1999; Leira 2001). 14
In these countries the number of public childcare facilities was still particularly low until the middle 1980s (Leira 1992; Bussemaker 1998; Voet 1998). Both states began however extensive development of social care services in the second half of the 1980s in spite of financial crises (above all caused by the labour market), and were at the end of twentieth century among the European countries with the most developed childcare infrastructure (European Commission 1998). This policy can be assessed as the response to cultural change and to the great general increase in employment, and contributed to a further increase in women's employment. Furthermore the possibilities for parents’ part-time work were promoted extensively; in both countries this was related to change in the patterns of job-hours of both parents and was an explicit part of a policy of equality (Plantenga 1996; Ellingsaeter 1999), while in Germany part-time work was mainly considered to be a possible solution to women's problems to balance employment and family responsibilities (Pfau-Effinger 2004a). Because the social security systems of the first two countries include a universal minimum retirement pension, the interruption of employment and part-time employment there has much less serious consequences for the individual's social security than in Germany, where the typically female employment history still always carries the risk of old-age poverty (Veil 1997).
The expansion of part-time employment in these welfare states occurred in the context of change in the institutional structures surrounding parenthood. This meant that in principle there was also a departure from the male norm of the full-time, lifelong employment career. The measures taken by the Norwegian welfare state to this end were especially far-reaching: the most important instruments were promotion of flexible periods for parenting and introduction of a parental leave scheme in which a nearly full replacement income was paid. This leave can also be combined with part-time work. That meant that home caring parents usually receive financial transfers by the state below the subsistence level. Besides this a special leave for fathers – non-transferable to mothers – was also introduced. Of course the fact that labour-market structures in the areas of the private economy dominated by men, as before, are geared to normal employment relationships, caused the realisation of the gender equality model to remain – in social practice – in its beginning stages (Ellingsaeter 1999; Leira 2001).
In general it can be said that in the conservative West German welfare regime as well as in the social-democratic welfare states of Norway and The Netherlands, a restructuring of family policy was being carried out. In all cases the housewife model with its edifice of dependencies, as the focal point for policy, was gradually replaced through greater promotion of equality in gender relations and the enhancement of individual autonomy for women. There were however clear differences among countries in the extent of the change. In the conservative welfare regime of West Germany, the unpaid care of mothers is still an important basis for the production of welfare, and as before requires a great deal of financial dependency in the marriage. In the ‘mixed’ welfare regime of the Dutch welfare state in contrast there were far-seeing attempts to encourage the symmetry in the share of employment and informal family childcare of parents. A departure from marriage as the fundamental unit of societal integration and existential security was here however much less promoted than in Norway, where social rights stem from the individual, and individual social security is a central aim of welfare state policy (Alestalo and Kuhnle 1991; Leira 2001).
Second path of development: Restructuring family policy on the basis of the dual breadwinner model and state childcare
In the development of welfare state policy in the countries whose care arrangements have changed by the second path, there was increasingly the tendency – even if welfare states generally were in crisis – that demands for women's equality were recognised and supported by the promotion of the expansion of the public childcare provision.
According to regime type of welfare state policy, social rights are varyingly constructed as family-oriented, or individual. In France, which Esping-Andersen (1990, 1999) classifies as a conservative welfare regime, the family is seen as the main unit to which social rights primarily refer (Daune-Richard 1998; Veil 1997, 2000; Siim 2000), while in the three social-democratic regimes of Sweden, Finland and Denmark, social rights are established as individual rights (Siim 2000). But at the same time French family policy since 1977 provides parents with generous, universal and not need-based childcare payments, and thus exhibits social-democratic features. The payments, paid at the birth of a second and every following child, make it possible for mothers to stay at home or work part-time until a child reaches age three, as a basic income is assured. However this possibility is taken advantage of by only few women, even by those who have two children, although only about one-half of children under three are in public childcare. For continuation of employment has become a self-evident cultural pattern, even after the birth of a second child and longer (Daune-Richard 2005; Maruani 2000; Fagnani and Letablier 2005). France also had a tradition of extensive state childcare, which since the 1970s has been in further expansion. The evolution of state care policies during the 1980s, especially after the election of Mitterand, was marked by a shift towards promoting gender equality (Martin et al. 1999). Since then however the emphasis of French state family policy is still rather on promoting natality and motherhood, than on the real achievement of equality in the family. It seems however that the idea of the egalitarian division of labour in the family apparently has not been supported by a majority of the population until recently (Daune-Richard 1998, 2005).
Welfare states with a social-democratic orientation had introduced an extensive system of public childcare facilities mainly in the 1960s. This can be seen as a reaction to the cultural transformation and the demands of women to integration into the employment system in transition to industrial society, in as far as they were articulated in a political setting (Siim 2000). In Sweden also by the 1970s an exemplary parental leave scheme model had been established, which offered parents generous and flexible leave options and a replacement income for the greater part of their leave period (Pfau-Effinger and Geissler 1992). In Sweden and Finland the goal of full employment integration of women was achieved in the 1980s, and thereafter, even in the labour-market crisis of the 1990s, never fundamentally threatened. Besides that, on the level of educational policy at that time, an expansion of university programmes was undertaken, in which in the intervening years women have participated to a clearly greater extent than men (Nordic Council of Ministers 1996; Koistinen 1999; Daune-Richard and Mahon 1997). Even in the crisis period of the welfare state, social rights with regard to childcare and access to public childcare facilities were, in general, still being extended (Siim 2000). In Sweden for example, after the restructuring of the childcare infrastructure there was a decrease in the amount of unpaid care in the family, as well as in the (already low) amount of privately paid and unregulated market-sector childcare work, while participation in state-sponsored schemes increased. Szebehely (1999: 278) has called these trends the ‘formalization, collectivisation and de-marketization of child care’.
Conversely in Finland in the course of the 1990s, i.e. during the crisis of the welfare state, there was a limited expansion in the market-accessed offer of childcare. According to Simonen and Kovalainen (1998) this resulted however not primarily from a change in state welfare policy but rather from the initiative of formerly publicly employed women kindergarten teachers who, unsatisfied with conditions in the public sector, themselves founded their own kindergartens and childcare networks.
5 Conclusions
Welfare state policies towards care are embedded into different modernisation paths of Western European care arrangements, which differ substantially in relation to the share of informal family childcare. These differences reflect on one hand differences in the traditions in relation to cultural values of the family, the way these have developed and the role of care in the cultural concepts of gender equality. On the other hand, they are based on differing cultural traditions what concerns the values in relation to sphere in which welfare should be provided as far as it takes place outside the family, and relation to the comprehensiveness and quality of social rights. According to the argument in this article, in those countries in which informal care still at the beginning of the twenty-first century plays a substantial role, this is not necessarily caused by a traditional and backward oriented welfare state policy which hinders the formalisation of social care. Instead, in several countries which follow this specific development path, the care policies of the welfare states to a substantial degree reflect that informal care plays an important role also in the modernised cultural concept of the family and of gender equality. In these cases the development of new social rights, which are connected to informal care, besides social rights connected to public care provision, are of substantial importance for a ‘progressive’ care policy. They are best developed in the ‘social democratic’ welfare regime of the Nordic countries.
Footnotes
The concept of ‘social rights’ comes from the theory by T. H. Marshall (1992) about the historical development of citizenship. In it, the history of modern societies is seen as a process, in the course of which people were able to extend their basic rights. Feminist researchers used Marshall's theory in part as a foil to articulate inequalities and injustices in the rights of women and men which result from the special situation of women in many countries, i.e. that they are mainly responsible for caring tasks (see also, especially, Siim 2000; Lister 2003).
Also, the ideas about childcare and elderly care may differ in important respects.
For a comparison of the differing development paths of the care arrangements in East and West Germany see Pfau-Effinger and Geissler 2002.
Because the change in cultural orientation of women and men concerning employment could be only insufficiently demonstrated on the basis of previously existing, internationally comparative attitude questionnaires, in the following I shall present the cultural context essentially using country-specific case studies, consisting of country-specific data and questionnaire results, as well as a secondary analysis of empirical studies.
Beyond the interrelation between welfare state gender policy and the family, its relation to other societal institutions such as the labour market and the educational system will be largely overlooked in the present analysis.
Simon S. Duncan has developed the ‘genderfare-model’ approach in order to use it for cross-national as well as for cross-regional comparison. Since welfare state policies are being focussed upon, the question of inner cultural differentiation, on the basis for example of region or social milieu, will be considered here only to the extent that a clearly recognizable influence on welfare state policies at the general societal level can be ascribed to them.
For Western Germany see Geissler and Oechsle 1996, Pfau-Effinger 2004a; for Great Britain see Crompton 1998, Fox Harding 1996, Dasko 2000, Daune-Richard 1998. Even if this model in these countries today has the greatest significance, that does not preclude that still other family models exist and influence behavior.
The common features can be explained by similarities in historical development, such the role of the urban bourgeoisie in history. For a socio-historical explanatory model of the author see Pfau-Effinger 2004b.
For France see: Hantrais 1996, Daune-Richard 1998, Martin 2001; Veil 1997; for Denmark see: Borchorst 1994, Jensen 1996, Siim 2000; for Sweden see: Anttonen 1997, Hirdman 1994, Szebehely 1999, Daune-Richard 1998, Veil 1997; for Finland see: Anttonen 1997, Gordon and Kauppinen 1997; Julkunen 1999, Julkunen/Nätti 2002.
Part-time work, in the sense of a definite reduction in the work- week, has hardly any significance in this model. In France in the 1990's women's part-time work was indeed on the rise, but this occurred mainly upon the initiative of employers, and part-time work is often not freely chosen by women themselves (see Daune-Richard 1998).
This description of the Dutch welfare state as a social democratic welfare state is not however undisputed. Some authors like Bussemaker and Kersbergen (1994) have argued that it exhibits, besides social-democratic, liberal and conservative features. It seems therefore adequate to talk about a ‘mixed’ welfare regime.
References
Birgit Pfau-Effinger is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Centre ‘Globalisation and Governance’ at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg. She has published widely in the fields of comparative welfare state analyses, comparative labour market analyses, sociology, and gender research, and sociology of transformation. Her recent books include Gender, Economy and Culture in the European Union (ed., 2000, with S. S. Duncan; Development of Culture, Welfare State and Women's Employment in Europe (2004). She has recently published in the Journal of Social Policy and the British Journal of Sociology.