Brown Bag Seminar: The Political Economy of Family Policy Expansion

About the Seminar

Contrary to the overall trajectory of the welfare state in high-income countries, family policy is expanding rather than retrenching, resulting in higher spending on childcare and a more egalitarian share of leave among parents. On the one hand, family policy expansion works to help boost maternal employment in low-service sector jobs. On the other, it reduces mothers’ care-work burden, smoothing the shift from the male breadwinner to the adult worker model.

At this seminar, sponsored by the Center on Poverty & Social Policy, Emanuele Ferragina, PhD (bio), Assistant Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, presents an empirical analysis of the interplay between these two movements – based on the simultaneous expansion of childcare spending and the retrenchment of minimum income guarantees – revealing that the first prevails in a majority of high-income countries.