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Universal public childcare for children under seven has been central in Finland since the mid-1990s, capacitating both gender equality and children's human capital and wellbeing. In 2015, as a further step in the development of this system, early learning and childhood pedagogy was strengthened through the early childhood education and care (ECEC) reform (statute 580/2015). Some months later, however, the right to full-day ECEC was restricted to children with employed parents (statute 108/2016). This paper discusses the objectives, framing and ideational drivers of these reforms on the basis of government bills and parliamentary debates. We argue that the development reflects a shift in emphasis from a universal and child-oriented social mobility ECEC rationale to a more austere rationale focussing on parents' and notably mothers' employment. We believe that the reforms will have negative effects on the quality of ECEC and increase inequalities in children's human capital and learning.

Considered scientific and objective tools, welfare experiments have become increasingly attractive for testing innovative policy reforms. The basic income especially has been a popular policy experiment, trialed in several communities. However, do policymakers use welfare experiments as a policy instrument to gain empirical evidence for contested policy ideas? What can the political debate on Twitter reveal about the strategic functions of welfare experiments? Using a unique dataset of Finnish MPs' Twitter tweets on the basic income trial in Finland from 2017 to 2018, this article finds that Members of Parliament (MPs) neither waited for new empirical findings nor argued in a constantly coherent way. In contrast, while waiting for the evaluation, the tweets of the MPs became increasingly negative, even though no further empirical knowledge was available. The quantitative empirical analysis concludes that the reference to core welfare paradigms was essential to the legitimisation of basic income, although framing between political parties differed. In summary, this article contributes to a better understanding of the strategic function of welfare experiments and demonstrates the usefulness of Twitter data for social policy analysis that goes beyond hashtag-based, big data-driven research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2010 and the onset of the economic crisis, Finnish governments have pressed for structural reforms, including unpopular cuts to family benefits and services. This article analyses the government discourse used for legitimating some of these reforms: the cutbacks in child benefit and the restriction of full-time childcare. It also assesses whether this discourse bore the hallmarks of a neoliberal austerity discourse, which could suggest that the reforms were not just a matter of fiscal balancing but also a matter of neoliberal welfare state restructuring. We argue that the economic crisis was central in the powerful 'communicative' discourse used by the governments for legitimating unpopular cuts. Not only did it draw on ideas from an austerity discourse advocating financial sustainability, fiscal prudency and debt reduction, it was also impregnated with ideas from a neoliberal worldview questioning some of the main principles of the 'Nordic' family policy model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]