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Seit dem 1. April 2016 können Eltern und Erziehungsberechtigte für ihre Kinder bis zum 18. Lebensjahr eine finanzielle Unterstützung vom Staat in Anspruch nehmen. Unabhängig vom Einkommen kann eine Familie mit minderjährigen Kindern jeweils 500 Zloty (ca. 116 Euro) monatlich für das zweite und die weiteren Kinder erhalten. Dieses Förderprogramm "Familie 500 plus" ist die Einlösung des wichtigsten Wahlversprechens der Regierungspartei Recht und Gerechtigkeit (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość - PiS). Zwar sind mittel- und langfristige Folgen des Programms für Frauen, die Geburtenrate, den Arbeitsmarkt oder die Gesamtwirtschaft in Polen noch nicht absehbar. Allerdings lassen sich, ausgehend von der Konzeption des Programms und den familienpolitischen Erfahrungen anderer Länder, bereits mögliche Folgen einschätzen. Ein besonderer Fokus wird in dieser Analyse auf die potentiellen Auswirkungen des Förderprogramms auf die Situation der Frauen in Polen gelegt.

The study provides estimates of the size of the fatherhood premium for the Czech Republic in the years 2006-2017, using data from the EU SILC survey. In the years 2006-2009, the fatherhood premium in the Czech Republic does not manifest itself if explanatory variables include the marriage premium and the partner's labour market participation. The fatherhood premium only starts to express itself in 2010 and the following years, when it reaches values from 11% to 15% as a consequence of a decision of families with high-income fathers to have a third child in the years after 2010.

Childcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work-family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work-family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.

Die "24-Stunden-Pflege" durch osteuropäische Betreuungskräfte ist wegen vielfältiger Problematiken umstritten. Eine rechtssichere, sozialstaatswürdige Ausgestaltung als weitere Säule des Pflegesystems ist notwendig und möglich; hierfür werden Eckpunkte einer Konzeption vorgestellt.

Das Evaluierungsprojekt widmete sich der Frage, inwieweit die neuen Regelungen dazu beitragen, die mit dem Kinderbetreuungsgeld und dem Familienzeitbonus in Verbindung stehenden und in der Wirkungsorientierten Folgenabschätzung formulierten politischen Zielsetzungen zu erreichen. Die Durchführung der Evaluierung fand in den Jahren 2018 bis 2021 statt und war als mehrstufiges Projekt mit unterschiedlichen methodischen Zugängen in einzelnen Teilstudien angelegt. Die Synthese aller im Rahmen der Evaluierung gewonnenen, empirischen Ergebnisse und die Beurteilung in Bezug auf die Wirkungsziele der Maßnahmen erfolgen mit der hier vorgelegten Meta-Analyse.

Das Working Paper gibt Einblick in den Stand der Evaluierung am Ende der ersten Projektphase 2018. Es umfasst einen für sich abgeschlossenen Teilbericht A zum inhaltlichen Schwerpunkt der ersten Phase, nämlich der Umstellung auf das Konto-System aus Sicht der Organisation und Verwaltung. Die hier dargestellten Ergebnisse basieren auf einer qualitativen Studie mit Expert/innen, die mit dem KBG-Konto und dem Familienzeitbonus auf Verwaltungsebene berufsmäßig zu tun haben. Im Teilbericht B sind Auswertungen der Verwaltungsdaten, welche in anonymisierter Form vom Kompetenzzentrum Kinderbetreuungsgeld der NÖGKK zur Verfügung gestellt wurden, enthalten. Diese sollen einerseits die Ergebnisse aus den Interviews mit den einzelnen Expert/innen validieren und sind andererseits dafür gedacht, zeitlich bedingte Entwicklungen darzustellen. Verändert sich über die Zeit das Antragsverhalten der Sozialversicherten? Gibt es einen Lerneffekt?

Zu viel Bevölkerung oder zu wenig? Wer soll Kinder bekommen und wer vom Gebären abgehalten werden? Kinderkriegen ist eingebunden in mächtige Regierungsstrategien, die auf Körper und Bevölkerungen abzielen. Das malthusianische Denken geht noch weiter, indem es fast alle Krisen unserer Zeit zu Bevölkerungsproblemen umdeutet. Der Status quo von sozialer Ungleichheit, Rassismus und globaler Zerstörung bleibt dabei allerdings unberührt. Die Autorin seziert das demografische Denken und versammelt Analysen deutscher Kinderwunsch-, Familien- und Migrationspolitik. Dabei hinterfragt sie auch eine "demografisierte" Klimadebatte und kritisiert repressive globale Verhütungsprogramme.

Although parents in almost all rich democracies are entitled to some form of paid parenting leave, fathers in particular often do not take all the leave available to them. As employers play an important role in the implementation of parenting leave policies, this article investigates what workplace characteristics influence mothers' and fathers' uptake of their statutory leave entitlements. In Part 1, we combine data from the OECD and the European Labor Force Survey to estimate the size of the "implementation gap" between statutory leave entitlements and leave uptake for mothers and fathers, and compare the size of this gap across countries. In Parts 2 and 3, we review the literature on structural and cultural workplace factors that promote or hinder parenting leave uptake. We conclude the article with suggestions for further research and stress the need for reliable data on the uptake of parenting leave entitlements and research on non-European countries., Obwohl Eltern in fast allen westlichen Industrienationen Anspruch auf Auszeiten nach der Geburt eines Kindes haben, nehmen insbesondere Väter diese Möglichkeiten oftmals nicht oder zumindest nicht vollumfänglich wahr. Da Arbeitgeber*innen eine wichtige Rolle bei der Implementierung von Elternzeitangeboten spielen, geht dieser Beitrag der Frage nach, welche Organisations- und Arbeitsplatzmerkmale die Inanspruchnahme von Elternzeit unter Müttern und Vätern beeinflussen. In Teil 1 des Beitrags kombinieren wir Daten der Europäischen Arbeitskräfteerhebung und der OECD, um das Ausmaß der "Implementierungslücke" bei der Elternzeit von Müttern und Vätern ländervergleichend darzustellen. In Teil 2 und 3 fassen wir die Ergebnisse existierender Forschungsarbeiten zu strukturellen und kulturellen Faktoren zusammen, welche die Inanspruchnahme von Elternzeiten begünstigen oder verhindern. In unseren abschließenden Hinweisen zu bestehenden Forschungsdesideraten stellen wir die Notwendigkeit ländervergleichender Erhebungen zur Inanspruchnahme gesetzlicher Elternzeitangeboten sowie Forschung in nicht-europäischen Ländern heraus.

Im Rahmen dieser Studie wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie sich Höhe und Art der Ausgaben in 22 EU-Staaten in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten verändert haben. Es soll aufgezeigt werden, wie sich Österreich in diesem Vergleich verortet und welche Entwicklungen sich hier in den Jahren 2018 bis 2021 abzeichnen. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen einen Trend in Österreich zu mehr Ausgaben für Sachleistungen und steuerlichen Unterstützungen und damit eine Verschiebung weg von den noch immer deutlich überwiegenden monetären Transfers.

Die qualitative Teilstudie der Evaluierung des Kinderbetreuungsgeldgesetzes (KBGG) und des Familienzeitbonusgesetzes (FamZeitbG) hatte einerseits die Funktion, tiefgreifende Erkenntnisse und Antworten zu den Zielen und Maßnahmen der Gesetzesnovelle aus Sicht der Bezieher/innen zu liefern. Die Studie fokussiert auf die in der Wirkungsorientierten Folgenabschätzung (WFA) explizierten politischen Zielsetzungen, nämlich: (a) die Vereinbarkeit von Familie und Beruf zu verbessern, (b) die Väterbeteiligung zu erhöhen und (c) die Gleichstellung von Frauen und Männern zu fördern. Die Studie zielt darauf ab, die Bedeutung dieser Ziele in der Alltagsrealität und im Entscheidungs- und Argumentationsverhalten von Müttern und Vätern zu eruieren, die Kinderbetreuungsgeld (KBG) bzw. den Familienzeitbonus (FZB) beziehen oder bezogen haben.

Educational and social initiatives promoting participation among children and adolescents struggle with the widely‐held notion that non‐adult stages of life are merely transitory and that, therefore, non‐adults' views on public life are of less value. Apart from this hurdle of adult‐centrism, there are other obstacles to the full participation of this segment of the population. The present study analyses the inbuilt structures that help or hinder children and adolescents' participation in the local arena. Being ascribed to one or other of the social categories (gender, origins, racialisation, economic status, functional diversity, physical and mental health, gender identity), in addition to being a child or adolescent, involves a further difficulty in exercising one's rights in general and the right of participation in particular, and this weakens young people's social inclusion and exercise of citizenship, deepening their social vulnerability. This is where the intersectional approach can help us avoid the exclusion of children and adolescents with added social barriers. In this article, we survey 191 local youth workers to determine their perceptions of inclusivity in child participation bodies in their municipality. The specific measures in place are also discussed. Lastly, we identify the challenges to children's inclusion in local participation processes and some strategies for advancing towards the creation of more diverse and inclusive arenas of participation.

This article analyses the interplay of public and occupational work‒family policies in institutionally different countries (Austria, Denmark, Italy and United Kingdom). Most of the existing studies do not analyse public and occupational family policy in conjunction, although this is necessary for a comprehensive understanding of family policy, and therefore the article adds knowledge on work-family policy and the interplay of public and occupational based approaches. Based on a diverse case selection strategy and using comparative information from European statistics, surveys and reports, the crowding-out hypothesis is excluded, but no one consistent relationship is found for all countries. Instead, the article adds to existing knowledge that the country-specific public-private mix depends on the institutional context (e.g. public family policy) and industrial relations.

This article quantifies the relative effectiveness of childcare subsidies and subsidies on grandmothers’ time on married mothers’ employment and fertility rates, paying special attention to heterogeneous effects. A heterogeneous agent model, populated by married households who make decisions related to labour supply and fertility, and the Spanish economy are used as a benchmark for calibration. The results indicate that childcare subsidies conditional on employment are more effective than subsidies on grandmothers’ time to foster the participation of married mothers in the labour force. However, they induce women to work fewer hours, unless after-school hours are also subsidised. This overtime subsidy is also necessary for the fertility rate to increase, but it implies a significant adjustment in tax rates to maintain the same fiscal balance. If the aim is simply to raise the employment rate of mothers of children aged 2 years or younger, then subsidising childcare costs only is more effective because the fiscal effort is lower. Regarding the heterogeneous effects, in all the policies studied, the growth in female employment is mainly accounted for by the behaviour of women without tertiary education while that of fertility is accounted for by women with tertiary education. Considerations related to inequality and distributional effects of these policies would also seem to favour childcare subsidies versus subsidies on grandmothers’ time.

We examine how parental unemployment affects children’s transition to postsecondary education in different institutional contexts. Drawing on theoretical perspectives in intergenerational mobility research and sociology of higher education, we estimate the extent to which these intergenerational effects depend on social and education policies. We use data from five longitudinal surveys to analyze the effects of parental unemployment on entry to postsecondary education in 21 countries. The results of multilevel regression analysis show that in contexts that provide better insurance against unemployment, in terms of generous earnings replacement, the adverse effect of parental unemployment is alleviated. Moreover, entry gaps between youth from unemployed and employed households are smaller in tertiary education systems with more opportunity-equalizing education policies that provide more financial support to students and reduce the role of private expenditure. Some evidence also indicates that policies are more relevant for children of less-educated unemployed parents.

Although an increasing number of studies emphasise migrants' lack of knowledge about their childcare rights as a crucial barrier to their childcare usage, almost none examines the conditions under which migrant families acquire this knowledge. This study contributes to the literature by exploring potential individual factors determining migrant families’ knowledge about their childcare rights in Germany. I use unique data collected through the project Migrants’ Welfare State Attitudes (MIFARE), in which nine different migrant groups in Germany were surveyed about their relation to the welfare state, including childcare. Analysing a total sample of 623 migrants living with children in their household and by using logistic regression analyses, I find that human and social capital play significant roles in explaining migrants' knowledge about their childcare rights. Migrants who speak the host language sufficiently are more likely to know about their childcare rights; however, it does not matter whether migrants are lower or higher educated. Moreover, I observe that migrants benefit from their co-ethnic relations only if childcare usage is high among their ethnic group. Based on these results, policy recommendations are discussed in order to increase migrants’ knowledge about their childcare rights in Germany.

Municipalities must take steps towards an "educational action" that welcomes children into environments that estimulate their involvement and participation in issues that mean something to them. Professionals working directly with children in the municipal sphere must strengthen the development of their active and committed citizenship (SDG no. 4), relating to them as citizens capable of transforming their environment. Children's participation requires adults who recognise them as interlocutors and establish relationships of trust and mutual respect with them. Municipalities need to create opportunities for children to be included in the co‐production of local projects and to take a leading role in public policies. This article aims to offer elements that can nurture professionals' readiness and "capacity building" to facilitate children's participation. These elements are formed in the context of a pedagogical practice (the “coffee meetings”) and emerge through a systematisation of experiences (Aguiar, 2013; Barnechea & Morgan, 2010; Jara, 2012, 2018; Mera, 2019). Coordinated by an inter‐university team, the reflective exchange promoted by the meetings between municipal technical professionals and elected representatives generates knowledge, ideas, and changes in participants' approaches to children's participation in municipalities' decision‐making processes; content analysis, development, and evaluation of the meetings by participants provide insight into the value of a learning community established as a tool to innovate child participation, build professional capacity towards this goal, and strengthen the work of local administrations in the field of citizenship.

This article discusses social inclusion policies for youth from vulnerable socioeconomic contexts, based on the ethnographic monitoring of an associative experience promoted by the Choices Programme ("Programa Escolhas") on the outskirts of Lisbon. Considered the main public policy directed at poor, racialised, and peripheral youth in Portugal, the Choices Programme is driven by strategies of empowerment and protagonism with a view to engaging youngsters in resolving the problems faced in the neighbourhoods in which they live. Both strategies call for citizen participation but restrict the youth's field of political action to the rules drawn up by the state, discouraging emancipatory and subversive discourse. The result is biopolitical control and management of marginalised youth, masking a domination that has domesticated their collective action. By recreating the meetings and activities that sought to inspire in these youngsters the virtues of associativism, I discuss how the discourses of empowerment and protagonism are incorporated as new devices of agency and community governmentality. In particular, I question the limits of citizen participation as a means to stimulate the political engagement of youth when this is tied to individualist ideologies distant from a grammar of rights.

The two‐way relationship between inclusion and participation makes municipal child participation organisations and experiences a key means of guaranteeing the inclusion in community life of children and adolescents, who are traditionally excluded from decision‐making and the promotion of changes in the realities of their lives. One of the main objectives of municipal child participation organisations is to ensure that these spaces are inclusive. This means that they must promote equality of guarantees and conditions in the development of the right to participation from a perspective that addresses the different axes of inequality, not only in access to these spaces but also in the relational dynamics that take place in them. Based on a theoretical reflection on inclusion and participation, this article analyses the data from a questionnaire applied to 279 people (191 technical figures and 88 elected authorities) from 179 municipalities in Spain, which seeks to describe the state of child and adolescent participation in municipalities that are part of the International Association of Educating Cities, Child Friendly Cities, or both. A qualitative analysis is made of those issues related to the strategies used to promote inclusion within the Children's Councils, as well as in the initiatives promoted in the field of child participation. The results show agreement in considering Children's Councils to be inclusive bodies, but the means and procedures used do not always guarantee this inclusiveness.

To explain single-mother poverty, existing research has either emphasized individualistic, or contextual explanations. Building on the prevalences and penalties framework (Brady et al. 2017), we advance the literature on single-mother poverty in three aspects: First, we extend the framework to incorporate heterogeneity among single mothers across countries and over time. Second, we apply this extended framework to Germany, the United Kingdom and Sweden, whose trends in single-mother poverty (1990–2014) challenge ideal-typical examples of welfare state regimes. Third, using decomposition analyses, we demonstrate variation across countries in the relative importance of prevalences and penalties to explain time trends in single-mother poverty. Our findings support critiques of static welfare regime typologies, which are unable to account for policy change and poverty trends of single mothers. We conclude that we need to understand the combinations of changes in single mothers’ social compositions and social policy contexts, if we want to explain time trends in single-mother poverty.

The article explores how categories of deserving and undeserving groups are established in policy designs and how social target groups are constructed according to such distinctions. Institutionalised systems of exclusion and inclusion have a profound impact on citizenship and substantial democracy. Neoliberalist political ideas and attitudes have strengthened the focus on deserving and undeserving groups over the last years and spurred a popular belief that welfare fraud is rampant. This tendency has led to a retrenchment of established rights and increasing use of illiberal means to further punish the undeserving. This article discusses these issues further by looking at the position of lone mothers in Denmark and how they constitute a social target group defined by their class, gender, ethnic, and religious differences. Categories of deservingness are also framed in national narratives and politics of belonging.

Paid parental leave policies in both Australia and Japan fit within Dobrotić and Blum's (2020) classification of a selective employment-based entitlement model, thus offering an extension of that category beyond Europe and illustrating the wide variation possible within it. In this article we develop indices for comparing employment-based parental leave policies on three dimensions of social equality: inclusion, gender equality and redistribution. This combination offers an extension of classificatory schemes for parental leave policies and a broader basis for comparative analysis. We compare Australia and Japan on these indices and present a qualitative exploration of the origins and implications of their similarities and differences. The analysis draws attention to tensions between the three indices, illustrating intersecting and conflicting influences on the potential for paid parental leave entitlements to contribute to the amelioration of social inequalities. Overall, the comparison highlights drivers of difference within employment-based entitlement systems and underlines the need for complementary measures to advance egalitarian outcomes.

During the 2010s, both Finland and Sweden made advancements in their parental leave systems by widening the right to paid parental leave to a greater diversity of family constellations and investing in gender-equal leave distribution through longer leave periods reserved for the father. However, in the latter respect, Sweden has remained more successful than Finland. This article analyses government and political party discourses in Finland and Sweden during the 2010s in pursuit of an explanation to this difference and for understanding how ideas on social inclusion and gender equality have been used to drive, or block, policy reforms in the field of parental leave. The results show that the parental leave discourses have become influenced by ideas on social inclusion and gender equality in both countries, but in somewhat different ways. While gender equality has retained a stronger position in the Swedish discourse and its policy, social inclusion, and notably the rights of same-sex parents, have become more visible in the Finnish. However, the results also show that both ideas have remained contested on a party level, especially by confessional and nationalist-populist parties.

The prevailing gender ideologies in the Nordic countries generally support the equal division of work and family life between men and women, including the equal sharing of parental leave. Regardless, as the exceptional case in the Nordic region, Denmark currently has no father’s quota, and this despite the strong impact such policy has effectively proven to have on gender equality in take-up of parental leave. While a quota intended for the father is instead implemented in Denmark via collective agreements, this is mainly available for fathers in more secure labour market positions. This situates Danish fathers, mothers and their children very unequally regarding parental leave entitlements, and the existing inequalities continue across gender, social class and labour market positions. This article explores to what extent institutional variables vis-à-vis cultural explanations such as gender attitudes provide an understanding of why Danish fathers take less parental leave than other Nordic fathers. We use data from the European Values Study (1990‒2017) as well as administrative data for fathers’ parental leave take-up in the same period, relative to the other Nordics and for specific education backgrounds. We conclude that Danish men and women are even more supportive of gender equality in terms of work‒family life sharing compared to other Nordic countries. This indicates that institutional conditions such as parental leave entitlement matter for leave take-up, but in the Danish case attitudes do less so. Not having a father’s quota seems to affect fathers disproportionally across the education divide, and the lower parental leave take-up among Danish men with little education is primarily ascribed to their labour market insecurity. The policy implication is clear: If we want mothers and fathers with different social backgrounds to share parental leave more equally, the policy must change—not attitudes.

This article contributes to the conceptual and technical development of cross-national measurement and analysis of the gender gap in the scope of parenting related leave entitlements. That there is a gender gap in the scope of leave benefits is widely acknowledged, but it is rarely quantified. The nomenclature in use around leave policies is diverse and so a first step is to standardise categories and develop a unit of parenting related leave. There is considerable cross-national variation in the configuration of the scope of leave policies. As such, a second step is to consider how best to include the different dimensions of this scope (e.g., duration, payment level, individual parent versus family design) in an estimate of the gender gap in entitlement. Using data collated by the International Network on Leave Policies and Research, a gender gap indicator is created to contribute to our understanding of the inclusiveness of parenting related leave for men as compared to women. This indicator highlights that only two (Iceland and Norway) of 45 countries included in this analysis had achieved a zero-gender gap in terms of entitlement to ‘well-paid,’ individual parenting related leave during the first 18 months of a child’s life. The average gender gap for the countries in the analysis is between two to three months. Only seven countries offered more than two months leave to fathers as an individual entitlement. This is likely to be part of the explanation in many countries for lower leave taking practice by men compared to women.

This article aims to explore the role of eligibility for parental leave as a determinant of access and as an enabler of leave take-up. To analyse the link between eligibility and take-up, we study a unique policy change in Luxembourg's parental leave scheme. The country's 2016 parental leave reform relaxed the eligibility criteria to enable marginal part-time working parents to access the parental leave scheme for the first time. We focus on this change and examine to what extent relaxing the eligibility criteria translated into increased take-up by the marginal part-time working parents who became eligible. To quantify this transition, we analyse trends in and patterns of eligibility for the scheme in Luxembourg between 2009 and 2018 among first-time parents working full-time, part-time, or marginal part-time hours. We use a subsample of Luxembourg-resident, cohabiting, first-time parents (N = 6,254) drawn from the social security data. Our analysis shows that as eligibility is dependent on individual factors, it has similarities among mothers and fathers, whereas take-up is notably greater for mothers. After the reform, we observe that marginal part-time working mothers started taking parental leave, but up to 2018, the reform's outreach to marginal part-time working fathers remained limited. We also find that foreign national parents are less likely to be eligible for parental leave and have lower take-up rates. Despite the gendered parental leave take-up behaviours in parallel with international evidence, marginal part-time working mothers' positive response to the reform indicates progress towards strengthening women's labour market attachment in Luxembourg.

How can parental leave design be more socially inclusive? Should all parents be entitled to parental benefits or only those parents who are eligible based on a particular level of labour market participation? To think through questions of social inclusion in parental leave policy design, particularly issues related to entitlements to benefits, I make three arguments. First, aiming to extend Dobrotić and Blum's work on entitlements to parental benefits, I argue that 'mixed systems' that include both citizenship‐based and employment‐based benefits are just and socially inclusive approaches to parental leaves and citizenship. Second, to build a robust conceptual scaffolding for a 'mixed' benefits approach, I argue that that we need to attend to the histories and relationalities of the concepts and conceptual narratives that implicitly or explicitly inform parental leave policies and scholarship. Third, and more broadly, I argue that a metanarrative of care and work binaries underpins most scholarship and public and policy discourses on care work and paid work and on social policies, including parental leave policies. In this article, I outline revisioned conceptual narratives of care and work relationalities, arguing that they can begin to chip away at this metanarrative and that this kind of un‐thinking and rethinking can help us to envision parental leave beyond employment policy - as care and work policy. Specifically, I focus on conceptual narratives that combine (1) care and work intra‐connections, (2) ethics of care and justice, and (3) 'social care', 'caring with', transformative social protection, and social citizenship. Methodologically and epistemologically, this article is guided by my reading of Margaret Somers' genealogical and relational approach to concepts, conceptual narratives, and metanarratives, and it is written in a Global North socio‐economic context marked by the COVID‐19 pandemic and 21st century neoliberalism.

This article builds on a recent operationalization of inclusiveness of parental leave benefits proposed by Ivana Dobrotić and Sonja Blum and complements it by developing indicators of contextualized inclusiveness. This contextualized approach sets the formal entitlement and eligibility rules of social rights to parental leave benefits in the relevant socio‐economic context of the country to which these rules apply. The aim is to shed light on the extent to which parts of the country's population are actually excluded or are at risk of being excluded from access to parental leave at a given moment in time. This is strongly shaped by, among other factors, the structure of the population according to employment status, job tenure or type of contract. An important characteristic of the methodological approach adopted in this article is that the proposed contextualized indicators are based on easily and publicly available and internationally comparable data. This makes the approach easily applicable by wide audiences, academic and practice‐oriented ones alike. The proposed indicators are then applied to sixteen European countries and show a much more diversified and nuanced landscape of contextualized inclusiveness of parental leave entitlements in Europe than the comparison of formal inclusiveness done by Dobrotić and Blum suggested. This study also shows that higher formal inclusiveness of employment‐based parental leave benefits was more common in countries with higher shares of those social groups that, in case of less inclusive regulations, would not have access to parental benefits.

Even though paid maternity leave was the earliest form of social protection specifically aimed at women workers and is fundamental in securing their economic independence vis-à-vis employers and spouses, it has received scant scholarly attention. Neither the traditional historical accounts of welfare state emergence nor the more recent gendered analyses of developed welfare states have provided comparative accounts of its beginnings and trajectories. Employing the newly created historical database of maternity leave, we provide the first global and historical perspective on paid maternity leave policies covering 157 countries from the 1880s to 2018. Focusing on eligibility rather than generosity, we construct a measure of inclusiveness of paid maternity leaves to highlight how paid maternity leave has shaped not only gender but also social inequality, which has, until recently, largely been ignored by the literature on leave policies. The analyses of coverage expansion by sector and the development of eligibility rules reveal how paid maternity leave has historically stratified women workers by occupation and labor market position but is slowly evolving into a more universal social right across a broad range of countries. Potential drivers for this development are identified using multivariate analysis, suggesting a pivotal role for the political empowerment of women in the struggle for gender and social equality. However, the prevalence of informal labor combined with insufficient or non-existing maternity benefits outside the systems of social insurance still poses significant obstacles to the protection of women workers in some countries.

Die kürzliche Öffnung der Ehe in Irland und den USA für homosexuelle Paare hat in Deutschland erneut die Debatte um die rechtspolitische Neubestimmung von Ehe und Partnerschaft angefacht. Vor diesem Hintergrund diskutiert dieser Aufsatz, welchen analytischen Beitrag Nancy Frasers Gerechtigkeitstheorie zur Diskussion um die sogenannte "Homo-Ehe" leisten kann. Fraser begegnet Fragen der Vielfalt mithilfe einer Synthese von normativer Kritischer Theorie und poststrukturalistischen Elementen. Mit der hieraus folgenden multidimensionalen Perspektive und dem normativen Maßstab der "partizipatorischen Parität" wird ein Zugang jenseits identitätspolitischer Argumentation ermöglicht und demokratietheoretisch fundiert. Mit Fraser wird zudem ein pragmatisch gespeister Zugang vorgeschlagen, der die Bedingungen der Partizipation insbesondere im politischen Aushandlungsprozess sowie in den Arenen politischer Beteiligung und Entscheidungen auslotet. Damit wird der Blick auf jene Diskurse und Institutionen gelenkt, in denen Fragen der Gerechtigkeit und Bedürfnisse ausgehandelt handelt werden und in denen es gilt, In- und Exklusionsmechanismen aufzudecken., The recent decisions in the US and Ireland to allow homosexual persons full access to the institution of marriage have once again triggered a debate in Germany about whether the legal foundations of marriage and civil partnership should be renegotiated. Against this backdrop, this essay discusses the contribution of Nancy Fraser's theory of justice as an analytical approach to the debate about same-sex marriage, insofar as it provides a three-dimensional perspective and normative valuation standard beyond identity politics. The explanatory power of this approach derives from the fact that it specifically composes elements of normative critical theory and post-structuralism to deal with questions of diversity. Through the profoundly normative criterion of participatory parity insights into questions of democratic justice are obtained. Fraser suggests a pragmatic approach which takes into account participatory potential notably in the field of politics and therefore draws our attention to the political inclusion and exclusion in discourses and decisions within the democratic arena concerning justice and needs.

Previous studies suggest the relative importance of the impact of childcare policies on mental health in parents. There have also been studies showing that welfare states have differing policy packages, consisting of a mixture of familizing and individualizing policy measures. This study builds on and extends this knowledge by carrying out a European comparison of the association between mental well health and family policies. We use Lohmann and Zagel’s familizing and individualizing policy indices to describe family policies. Our main interest is differences in mental health depending on the country, household, and individual-level characteristics. Therefore, we apply a multilevel model to 26 countries included in the 2013 wave of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions survey (N = 141,648). The analysis found that, in general, parents of children under 13 have better mental health than other adults. We found individualizing policy measures to be positively related to mental health in parents, while familizing policies had a negative relationship. No evidence was found for the combined presence of individualizing and familizing policies making a difference to mental health in parents. These results suggest that welfare states could help parents by promoting individualizing policies to make parenthood a less stressful experience.

Hans Thiersch trauert der gescheiterten Reform nicht nach. Im Gespräch mit Karl August Chassé kritisiert er die deutliche Tendenz in den Novellierungsentwürfen, Hilfebedürftigkeit klassifikatorisch festzulegen. Das erscheint ihm fatal, stattdessen müsse sich die Jugendhilfe auf den Kern des KJHG konzentrieren, den Hilfeplan als kommunikative gemeinschaftliche Verhandlung anzulegen. Die Gesellschaft braucht insgesamt eine übergreifende Kinder- und Jugendpolitik. Die Jugendhilfe muss viel stärker deutlich machen, was sie mit angemessenen Ressourcen leisten könnte. Alltagsbildung als eigensinniger Bereich wird in diesem Zusammenhang immer wichtiger.

Im Juli 1959 erklärte das Bundesverfassungsgericht den so genannten "väterlichen Stichentscheid" für verfassungswidrig. Mit dieser Entscheidung verwarf es zwei Paragraphen des Gleichberechtigungsgesetzes von 1957, in denen sich ein patriarchalisches Verständnis elterlicher Autorität niedergeschlagen hatte. Diese Entscheidung des Gerichts lässt sich als ein Durchbruch einer emanzipatorischen Geschlechterpolitik interpretieren. Die Argumentation der Richter entsprach einem in der westdeutschen Öffentlichkeit verbreiteten Bedürfnis, väterliche Autorität nicht mehr als ein natürliches Entscheidungsrecht des Mannes und ein hierarchisches Verhältnis von Befehl und Gehorsam zu interpretieren. Die Suche nach neuen Formen der Vaterschaft war in der frühen Bundesrepublik ein zentrales Thema der allgemeineren Selbstverständigung über Autorität und Demokratie. In der Debatte um den "demokratischen Vater" experimentierten die Westdeutschen mit einem Lebensgefühl, das es ihnen erlaubte, die Bundesrepublik nicht nur als Schicksal, sondern als Chance zu begreifen., On 29 July 1959, the Federal Constitutional Court of West Germany declared that the "paternal casting vote" was unconstitutional. This ruling annulled two elements of the family law reform of 1957 which had codified a patriarchal conception of parental authority. Within the bounds of civil law, fathers no longer had the final word. This essay interprets the court’s ruling as the emergence of emancipatory gender policies. In addition, it analyses criticism of the "paternal casting vote" during the 1950s in relation to contemporaneous debates over the meaning of paternal authority. The search for new kinds of fatherhood was not merely an obsession of the West German public between the early 1950s and the mid-1960s; it also played a key role in the process of democratisation in a society whose citizens were emerging from a murderous past and striving to steer a course, marked by tensions between democracy and authority, in order to construct a better polity.

We use 2012 data on economically developed countries from the International Social Survey Program to examine variation in “cultural norms” (at the world region and country levels) and “attitudes” (at the individual level) regarding the appropriate roles of family members and formal providers in both the provision and financing of assistance with daily activities at home. Our analysis has two parts: (1) a descriptive analysis of differences in cultural norms by world region and country (N = 25 countries) and (2) a multilevel multinomial logistic regression analysis of the importance of country-level factors in explaining individuals’ elder support attitudes (N = 21 countries). In the descriptive analysis, we find substantial variation in cultural norms both between world regions and between countries within all world regions except for the Nordic countries. The multilevel regression analysis points to the importance of two sets of country-level factors—“macrostructural factors” and “cultural–contextual factors”—in explaining individuals’ elder support attitudes. With regard to macrostructural factors, we find, consistent with our hypotheses, greater support for “publicly financed formal assistance” (i.e., the financing of formal assistance is supported by public funds) in countries with higher spending on services. The effects of the cultural–contextual factors are mostly consistent with our hypotheses and suggest the importance of taking into account the wider religious and political context in explaining individuals’ elder support attitudes. We conclude with a discussion of the social scientific and social policy implications of our findings.

Focusing mostly on Europe, this overview reveals how the research on cross-national differences in intergenerational family relations has moved from basic descriptions to a focus on understanding how support exchanges are shaped by macro-level processes. A key issue concerns generational interdependence, the extent to which public policy arrangements impose reliance on older and younger family members or enable individual autonomy. Real theoretical progress is visible in three areas of research. The first pertains to analyses at the micro level of how family members actually respond to the incentives that different macro contexts provide. The generosity or restrictedness of public provisions variably releases or necessitates normative obligations in interdependent family relationships. The second area of progress involves analyses of the implications of specific policies rather than policy packages for gender and socioeconomic inequality. The third area of progress is a more nuanced view on the familialism–individualism divide. These three areas provide inspiring examples for future investigations.