Introduction: family policies in the German-speaking countries reforms and explanations.
| Verfasser | Ahrens, Regina |
1 Family Policy Reforms in the German-Speaking Countries
By referring to the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth as "Frauen und das ganze Gedons" (women and all this hullabaloo; Ristau 2005: 21), former chancellor Gerhard Schroder couched the relative insignificance of the ministry and family policies in general, compared to other departments of his government. Having been institutionalized as a sort of "less-than-ideal" solution (Gerlach 2010: 245) in the 1950s, German family policy was for a long time affected by partisan argumentation and has only slowly adapted to families' real living situations. In the last few years though, the importance of the policy field has increased significantly and family policy has been subject to several far-reaching reforms, e.g. the introduction of an income-related parental benefit (2007). Similar developments can be observed for Swiss and Austrian family policies (in the following see Blum and H?usermann/Kubler in this issue): In Switzerland, family policy benefits remained on a very modest level until the late 1990s. However, at the turn of the millennium, a series of reforms gave a boost to the policy field, e.g. by the implementation of a federal program to subsidize child-care infrastructure (2003), the introduction of a compulsory maternity insurance (2005), and a nationwide harmonization of family allowances (2006). Similar to German and Swiss family policy, also Austrian family policy can be considered as being traditionally strongly familialistic, but has also recently been subject to ongoing restructuring, e.g. in the field of leave policies, which were repeatedly reformed in 2000, 2002, 2008 and 2010. All in all, family policies in the German-speaking countries have lately been subject to expansion.
These changes in family policies happened against the back-ground of demographic changes and economic and societal challenges. However, scientific findings concerning these developments did not alone manage to provoke political responses. These reactions have also been considerably influenced by supranational developments like the adoption of the EU's Lisbon Strategy (2000) that called for making the European Union the "most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion" (European Council 2000). By recognizing the consequences of demographic and societal changes for the families, the Lisbon Strategy set the land-mark for higher (female) employment rates and improved child-care provision (European Council 2000). In addition to the Lisbon Strategy, developments in other policy fields have also influenced changes in family policy. As Augustin-Dittmann (see her contribution to this issue) shows for the German case, the results of the 'Programme for International Student Assessment' (PISA) published in 2001 had major impacts on family policy by boosting the debate about full-time schooling and thereby shaping the question of a better reconciliation of work and family life.
We argue that developments like PISA and the Lisbon Strategy have also contributed to an increase in international bench-marking (including the identification of ?good practices') which aims at defining factors of success and failure in terms of family policy goals. In this vein, even though the European Union has no legal competence in the field of family policy, it indirectly influences national family policies via different instruments (for a more detailed overview see Ahrens 2008). As an example, the open method of coordination and benchmarking processes--set up by the Lisbon Strategy-were adopted to the area of social policy within the European Union and are also used in the realm of family policy. Both methods aim at encouraging an active exchange of Member States in different areas (e.g. Commission of the European Communities 2001: 28). In the context of family policy, the so called European Alliance for Families, set up in 2007 under the German presidency, institutionalizes these exchanges of knowledge and good practices. The Alliance serves "as a platform for the exchange of views and knowledge on familyfriendly policies as well as of good practices between Member States" (European Council 2007: 8) and thereby aims at fostering policy learning processes across the EU.
However, despite of similar starting conditions in terms of welfare state regimes1 and despite of similar international developments shaping the three countries, family policy reforms in Germany, Switzerland and Austria had different outputs, for example in the area of leave policies: Although the changes that occurred in this realm in the last decade can be classified as far-reaching ones, only the German reform with its introduction of...
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