ERA · Expanding Rights in an Age of Retrenchment: Women, Social Movements and the Politics of Family Leave
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2017-09-04 → 2019-09-03
- EU contribution
- €185,857
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Expanding Rights in an Age of Retrenchment: Women, Social Movements and the Politics of Family Leave
Affluent democratic countries have created and expanded paid parental leave for fathers since the 1970s, but policies have developed along different timelines and trajectories. Traditional explanations of cross-national policy variation emphasize social democratic parties and trade unions. Yet, research on more recent family policy reforms suggest alternative political actors or party competition as sources. While extensive research and theorizing have been done, quantitative tests examining sources of family policies are surprisingly rare. Expanding Rights in an Age of Retrenchment: Women, Social Movements, and the Politics of Family Leave (ERA) takes advantage of newly available, country-level, longitudinal data to apply event history methods to cross-national comparative analysis. The project addresses two main questions: Why did some countries adopt parental leave policies faster than others? And why have some countries adopted more inclusive family leave policies while others have not? The project’s research aims are especially urgent within the current European political context. Early this year, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted a directive on Work-life Balance for Parents and Carers to encourage men and women to engage equally in family responsibilities. Previous studies that offer policy recommendations rarely provide a roadmap for achieving such policies politically. This project makes a unique societal contribution by examining the political and socio-economic conditions under which governments adopt gender egalitarian family policies. Suggesting political opportunities for policy reforms can guide efforts of earner-carer family policy advocates and inform approaches by EU-level agencies and representatives. ERA pursued objectives related to contributions to research and the researcher’s career development. Research-oriented objectives were to (1) link social movement outcome and comparative welfare state theories, two bodies of research that seek to explain policy development but are insufficiently integrated, (2) bring qualitative and quantitative research on policy development in closer communication to inform data collection and analysis, (3) apply quantitative event history methods, that are common in research on U.S. social movements, to comparative policy analysis, and (4) establish the first cross-national historical compilation of leave rights adoption, facilitating future research in this area and related fields. Career development objectives were to (5) build the researcher’s language and research method skills, (6) create opportunities for hands-on grant-writing skills, and (7) provide the researcher with additional experience in communicating research to diverse, non-academic audiences.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Recent innovations in family policy extend parental leave benefits to fathers and establish paid family leave to care for non-child relatives, such as spouses and parents. Such policies seek to ease work-life tensions, yet there are considerable cross-country differences in the existence, duration and generosity of paid parental and family leave benefits. While welfare state theories offer several explanations for cross-country differences in family policies, we have few explanations for policy content – who is included and excluded from provisions – and the timing of policy change.ERA will apply a unique, recursive mixed-method approach to understand the nature and extent of interactions between various key actors, such as representatives from government, organized labor, women’s movements and organizations opposed to reform, and how such interactions shape family policies. While my quantitative approach will consider the timing of parental leave policy adoption, my qualitative approach will focus on how specific family members – particularly non-child relatives – become incorporated under leave law. Analysis will combine insights from interdisciplinary fields of social movement outcomes (in sociology) and comparative policy analysis (in sociology and political science) and make theoretical contributions to both fields. ERA is a cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary and gender-mindful project that includes end-users in project implementation and an ambitious dissemination, communication and outreach strategy. I bring close to 10 years of experience working in interdisciplinary research centers, publishing independently and with collaborators and expertise in social movements and mixed methods. Collaboration with researchers at the interdisciplinary Swedish Institute for Social Research promises new competencies in policy research and comparative policy analysis and will result in a new, publicly accessible data module, facilitating future cutting-edge research.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET · StockholmCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union