Failing family policy in post-communist Central Europe

Abstract

This article examines the developments of family policies in four post-communist countries (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary). A general tendency has emerged of implementing familist, gendered policies that encourage women to leave the labor market to raise children. The interplay of the ideological, economic and institutional legacy of the communist past with new economic, social and political conditions coupled with shifts in values have greatly influenced these policies.

Acknowledgments

This study was written with the support of the Czech Ministry of Education (project MSM 0021622408 “Reproduction and Integration of the Society”).

Notes

1. Re-familization differs from familization in that familization policies are the general policies that a regime pursues, while re-familization connotes a direction. It implies that a country that once has carried out policies which to some extent have deviated from familization policies has now moved back toward policies that encourage increased familization.

 As Hantrais (2003: 204) writes about post-communist countries: “Family policy can be said to have been refamilialised. This does not mean that formal institutional structures for managing family policy are non-existent, or that they are not legitimised. It does mean they are underfunded, that support for families is often rhetorical rather than practical and that the state is not trusted to deliver good quality and reliable services.”

 We use the term “re-familization” because before the war the Central European Countries pursued familist conservative social policies. Their policies were based on the conservative Bismarckian model: all family benefits were insurance-based including maternity benefits which were a part of sickness insurance that depended on the woman's employment record. Maternity benefits were limited to mothers and were only paid for 12 weeks (24 weeks in Hungary) at a replacement rate of 100 per cent (50 per cent in Poland). These countries did not introduce child benefits until after the war (except Hungary, where child allowance for state servants and low income groups existed in the pre-war period, and in Czechoslovakia, where they were only available for civil servants), and child care services did not exist. All in all, childbearing costs as well as child care have been assumed to be completely a family responsibility while caring duties were imposed on women due to the predominating male breadwinner model of the family.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven Saxonberg

Steven Saxonberg is an associate professor of political science in the Department of Government at Uppsala University in Sweden. He is also a research associate at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, in the Faculty of Social Studies and a lecturer in the Department of Social Studies and Sociology at Dalarna University College in Sweden. He has written two books, The Fall: A Comparative Study of the End of Communism in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland (Reading: Gordon & Breach, 2001), with a foreword by Seymour Lipset, and The Czech Republic Before the New Millennium (East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 2003). In addition, he has published articles in books and scientific journals on such topics as welfare attitudes and attitudes toward gender, female representation in post-communist parliaments, the collapse of the communist regimes, the development of post-communist party systems and contemporary Czech politics. His journal publications include, among others, Journal of Democracy, East European Politics and Society, European Societies, Problems of Post-Communism, The Czech Sociological Review, and Journal of Marriage and the Family.

Tomáš Sirovátka

Tomáš Sirovátka is a professor of social policy and social work at the Masaryk University (Faculty of Social Studies) in Brno, Czech Republic. His research focuses on social and labour market policies, social exclusion and social inclusion. He has contributed to such journals as Czech Sociological Review, Prague Economic Papers, Polish Sociological Review and Journal of Marriage and the Family. He has also edited books in Czech on Czech social and labour market policy and contributed to several books abroad (Townsend, P. and Gordon D. (Eds) New Policies to Defeat an Old Enemy, Bristol: The Policy Press 2002).