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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ERA (Expanding Rights in an Age of Retrenchment: Women, Social Movements and the Politics of Family Leave)

Teaser

Summary

Affluent democratic countries have created and expanded paid parental leave for fathers since the 1970s, but policies have developed along different timelines and trajectories. Traditional explanations of cross-national policy variation emphasize social democratic parties and trade unions. Yet, research on more recent family policy reforms suggest alternative political actors or party competition as sources. While extensive research and theorizing have been done, quantitative tests examining sources of family policies are surprisingly rare. Expanding Rights in an Age of Retrenchment: Women, Social Movements, and the Politics of Family Leave (ERA) takes advantage of newly available, country-level, longitudinal data to apply event history methods to cross-national comparative analysis. The project addresses two main questions: Why did some countries adopt parental leave policies faster than others? And why have some countries adopted more inclusive family leave policies while others have not?

The projectâ€™s research aims are especially urgent within the current European political context. Early this year, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted a directive on Work-life Balance for Parents and Carers to encourage men and women to engage equally in family responsibilities. Previous studies that offer policy recommendations rarely provide a roadmap for achieving such policies politically. This project makes a unique societal contribution by examining the political and socio-economic conditions under which governments adopt gender egalitarian family policies. Suggesting political opportunities for policy reforms can guide efforts of earner-carer family policy advocates and inform approaches by EU-level agencies and representatives.

ERA pursued objectives related to contributions to research and the researcherâ€™s career development. Research-oriented objectives were to (1) link social movement outcome and comparative welfare state theories, two bodies of research that seek to explain policy development but are insufficiently integrated, (2) bring qualitative and quantitative research on policy development in closer communication to inform data collection and analysis, (3) apply quantitative event history methods, that are common in research on U.S. social movements, to comparative policy analysis, and (4) establish the first cross-national historical compilation of leave rights adoption, facilitating future research in this area and related fields. Career development objectives were to (5) build the researcherâ€™s language and research method skills, (6) create opportunities for hands-on grant-writing skills, and (7) provide the researcher with additional experience in communicating research to diverse, non-academic audiences.

Work performed

Using event history methods, this project examined relationships between different political actors and the timing of paid paternity and parental leave policy adoption across 22 countries from 1965 to 2011. Findings show that, controlling for socio-economic and institutional characteristics, countries with higher shares of government seats held by women and confessional right party members are faster to adopt paid leave rights for fathers. Given that women and confessional right party representatives hold a small share of legislative seats across countries and over time, findings suggest that women and confessional right representatives inform the extent to which family policy reforms are prioritized in legislative agendas, while a constellation of different political actors influence the type of parental leave provisions adopted. The main results of this project are reported in a manuscript under preparation for a top international and interdisciplinary journal. Results were presented at five specialty and general sociology conferences around the world, including the American Sociological Association.

The project required compilation of new data on the timing of paternity and parental leave policy reforms across 22 countries spanning over four decades. This historical data has been shared with data managers of the Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI) at Stockholm University, the host institution for the project. To facilitate future research, this new data will be incorporated into the publicly accessible SOFI-SPIN data infrastructure.

The project strengthened the researcherâ€™s ties with non-academic research end-users, including the European Trade Union Institute, where the researcher stayed as a guest researcher for a secondment. The researcher also joined the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (INLPR), a well-known network of country-based family policy experts that issues annual policy reports that are used by academic and non-academic family policy analysts. The researcher also contributed (together with co-authors) to a 2018 statement to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from the Sociologists for Women in Society on the theme of social protection systems for gender equality.

The IF supported preparation of closely related partner publications on leave policy development. One paper argues that states are faster to adopt gender-neutral parental and family leave policies when trade union institutions are strong and is currently under revise and resubmit at a top disciplinary journal in sociology. In a forthcoming publication of the Palgrave Handbook of Family Policy, the researcher contributed a chapter that draws on key insights from the researcherâ€™s MSCA-supported cross-national comparative research to highlight innovative aspects of U.S. state policies â€“ namely, the emphasis on individual entitlements and leave to care for sick and aging relatives. The researcher also shared new and unique policy data in a publicly accessible SOFI working paper.

Final results

ERA included several innovative aspects. First, the project developed and used new, original data on the adoption and expansion of paternity and parental leave rights across countries and over time. Second, the project contributed a rare cross-national and historical comparative examination of the politics of parental leave policy development. Finally, it presented the first, quantitative study of the family policy reforms to distinguish between different types of leave rights for fathers and the first to assess the effects of confessional right party actors on the timing of reforms. Results enhance previous explanations of social policy development by showing how political actors influence the extent to which family policy reforms are prioritized in legislative agendas.

Tasks carried out under the MSCA strengthened the researcherâ€™s career prospects. Most notably, training through hands-on grant-writing experience resulted in newly awarded funding. The researcher will therefore continue at SOFI for 2020-2023 as lead and sole researcher of a new project that expands the line of research supported by the MSCA. With this new funding, the researcher will expand the previously-collected MSCA-supported data on the timing of leave rights adoption to include annual time measures of fathersâ€™ leave provisions, including data on leave duration and wage replacement benefits. Data will be made publicly available for the benefit of future research and for use by policy experts in academia, government agencies, and civil society organizations.