The multidimensional politics of social investment in conservative welfare regimes: family policy reform between social transfers and social investment

ABSTRACT

While we have many studies on social investment policies and their effects, we still know fairly little about the politics of social investment, especially in conservative welfare states, which provide the hardest ground for these reforms. What are the key conflicts in social investment politics? How do they intersect with compensatory welfare state conflict? Which coalition potentials exist? Based on a newly collected dataset, this contribution analyses actor configurations in German family policy reform processes since 1979. It shows that the development of social investment in conservative welfare regimes can only be understood if we conceptualize its politics in a multidimensional space. Income protection and social investment can be, and oftentimes are, two distinct conflict lines. Hence, political exchange and ambiguous agreements were conducive to a hybrid policy development: income support expansion coexists with social investment reforms. The findings show how a social investment turn can happen even in a least likely case.

KEYWORDS:

• Family policy
• Germany
• multidimensionality
• politics
• social investment
• social policy

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this contribution have been presented at the 2014 meeting of RC19 of the ISA in Yokohama, Japan, as well as at the Social Investment workshop in November 2016 in Lausanne, Switzerland. I am grateful to the participants of these conferences, as well as to the editors of this collection and three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. I also would like to warmly thank Alexander Frind and Christine Zollinger for terrific research assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Silja Häusermann is professor of political science at the University of Zurich, Switzerland

Notes

1 This is why the investment dimension tends to correlate with the broader partisan conflict regarding universalist-particularist values (Beramendi et al. 2015: 18ff; Häusermann and Kriesi 2015).

2 In some countries, the state may practice a market-liberal model by allowing for cheap market-based care. This may, however, feed into a reinforcement of the employment-based model (if more middle-class women participate in the labour market through the availability of affordable care and lower-class women hold such jobs).

1 What today is often – and, from a contemporary perspective, rightfully – depicted as a patriarchal and inegalitarian system oppressing women’s independence was then claimed by large parts of the women’s movement itself, as Naumann (2005) shows for the German case.

2 However, family policy is made at sub-state levels, too. A study focusing on the development of policy outcomes would, of course, need to include the sub-state level reforms. For the tracing of coalitional dynamics, however, the 18 reforms provide a sufficient empirical basis.

3 This data are based on our investigation of all reform issues since the late 1970s in Germany’s family policy (see supplemental material).