'Care going public' in the familialist welfare regime? : ideas and politics of Taiwan's elder-care reform

East Asian familialist welfare regimes have experienced major elder-care reforms over the last two decades under socio-economic and political pressures. This raises questions regarding the policy continuity and change of the familialist trajectories and its explanations. Adopting too narrow a focus on policy change, and viewing it as an automatic response to functional and political pressures, or as a static trajectory of the existing cultural and institutional legacies, the existing East Asian welfare state literature has found it difficult to understand the dynamics and outcomes of these rapid policy reforms. This thesis addresses these questions by undertaking a case study of Taiwan’s elder-care reform between 2004 and 2016, based on an analysis of documents from governmental and non-governmental sources and in-depth interviews with high-profile government officials, legislators, and representatives of advocacy groups. By developing a comprehensive framework based on the concept of defamilialisation, which covers the major policy domains of elder care, including legal caring obligations, care services and provision, cash benefits, and care leave, this thesis demonstrates that Taiwan’s elder-care reform involves a high degree of policy continuity with the familialist trajectory. This policy continuity results from the interaction between policy ideas and political agency operated differently in two distinct periods of reform. Calling for stronger public responsibility for elder care, policy actors promote diverging reform ideas, which involves different treatments of the defamilialisation of care responsibility and the formalisation of informal care labour. Strategic policy actors are not only able to bring forward new policy ideas through power imbalance among actors (policy ideas of powerful political actors), but, in a different setting, they can also resist policy change through the exercise of the ideational ambiguity of ‘care going public’ (policy ideas empowering political actors). Examining the interplay between ideas and politics in Taiwan’s elder-care reform, this thesis furthers the understanding of East Asian social policy development by moving beyond the conventional functionalist, democratisation, and cultural theses, and also enriches general analyses of the transformation of social care and policy change.