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ABSTRACT
Finland and Germany are traditionally seen as members of different welfare regimes with rather different approaches to family policies. During the last decade or so, poverty concerns have received an increasingly prominent position within family policy in both countries. The objects for these concerns have been different constellations of ‘poor’ families, and the policies pursued to counteract poverty have ranged from targeted measures to investments in childcare services. It has been suggested that the motivation behind recent social policy developments in Europe is a stronger accentuation of so-called social investment ideas calling for more activation, targeting and higher future returns through investments in human capital. This article explores the impact of social investment ideas on policy discourses about family-related poverty in Finland and Germany since the late-1980s by analysing poverty constructions and anti-poverty policy recommendations in government and party programs. The findings suggest a stronger focus on social investment ideas in the German discourse in terms of higher accentuation of ideas relating to equal opportunities, activation and prevention of poverty in a life-cycle perspective, whereas targeting have become a main topic in Finnish elite discourses. Furthermore, while being conditioned by institutional factors and historical policy legacies, social investment ideas have largely been adopted in an incremental way parallel to path-dependent national policy legacies.