Between instrument tinkering and policy renewal: reforms of parental leave in Germany and Austria (1).
| Verfasser | Blum, Sonja |
1 Introduction
Both Austria and Germany have been marked by the catchy term of being strong male breadwinner countries: They are traditionally characterized by low levels of mothers participating in the labor market, by women's derived rather than individual rights within the social insurance systems, and by deficient childcare facilities (Lewis and Ostner 1994). Their family policies have developed a strong bias towards financial transfers and tax reductions, while services play only a minor role. This article focuses on parental leave policies, which are highly interesting cases to study: Firstly, they are--together with childcare policies--at the heart of the specific motives, which family policies follow and "how public policies treat care" (Daly and Rake 2004: 51). Secondly, leave policies are crucial for tensions between work and welfare: On the one hand, there is evidence that female (full-time) employment rates are higher in countries with paid parental leave and childcare subsidies (European Commission 2005: 5). On the other hand, there is evidence that long leaves lead to deteriorations in labor market skills and have negative effects on female career paths and earnings (European Commission 2005: 80). Thus, parental leave arrangements can be both: a help and a barrier for the reconciliation of work and family life. Germany and Austria used to provide long and low-paid parental leaves, thereby fostering career breaks of mothers and their possible (part-time) re-entry into the labor market afterwards.
However, while family policies in Germany and Austria suffered from low power and prestige for decades (Badelt and Osterle 2001: 162), they have recently gained tremendous importance. What is more, family policies in both countries have been constantly restructured during the last years. With regard to these policy changes, the decisive question has been raised, to what extent they preserve the traditional system characteristics and to what extent they adjust and abandon to the point of break with them. To answer this, Hall's (1993) distinction between first, second and third order changes is introduced in Chapter 2 and then in Chapter 3 applied to the parental leave reforms conducted in Germany (2001, 2007) (2) and Austria (2000, 2002, 2008, 2010) in the first decade of the new millennium. However, since Hall's categories lack causal hypotheses, Chapter 2 also discusses potential explanations for the varying reform outputs. Then in Chapter 4, following the reform stock-taking of Chapter 3, the reform processes are studied closely. This analysis shows that it is important to focus on the politics of the reform processes and on the entrance of new actors and ideas to understand why policy outputs remained policy tinkering or implemented policy renewals. Chapter 5 discusses results in comparative perspectives.
2 Between instrument tinkering and policy renewal
This chapter recapitulates Hall's (1993) distinction between first, second and third order policy changes (2.1) and subsequently discusses probable explanations for varying reform outputs (2.2).
2.1 Stock-taking varying policy outputs
When analyzing policy change, the question on the scope of the reforms is decisive: Do they constitute systemic changes; are they marked by pathdependencies? And when are changes "big enough to be a system shift" (Hinrichs and Kangas 2003)? Hall's (1993) concept of social learning has lately been applied to family policy to answer such questions (e.g. Seeleib-Kaiser 2002). As Pfau-Effinger (2006) argued, Hall's approach allows for the useful inclusion of social actors and welfare ideas into the pathdependence approach (North 1990): These are the forces bringing social institutions and arrangements about. Ideas and ideologies are of particular importance when analyzing family policies, since these are more normative than other social policies; deriving from the correspondence between family policy and what is defined to be or ought to be a family (Luscher 1999).
Hall's concept provides for this normative character, since it emphasizes the role of ideas and paradigms (3) in policy-making. 'Policy learning' is defined to take place if policy changes as a result of a "deliberate attempt to adjust the goals or techniques of policy in response to past experience and new information" (Hall 1993: 278). If either instrument settings are altered or new measures introduced due to dissatisfaction with existing policies, this is not perceived as 'learning' as long as the underlying goals remain unaltered. These are called first order changes (adaptation of existing instruments) or second order changes (introduction of new instruments) respectively. Only if policy instruments are renewed in response to an altered guiding interpretative framework and corresponding goals on a given policy field, Hall speaks of third order, fundamental policy changes. These can be conceptualized as system shifts, since they break with the paradigms that have guided policy-making in the past.
According to Hall's approach, a paradigm change takes place in different stages. Initially, the present paradigm loses legitimacy, e.g. due to political, societal or economic crises, which it cannot explain--these are called 'anomalies' by Kuhn (1962), on whose concept Hall builds. What starts then is a stage of policy experimentation, a search for alternative explanations. Policy-making reacts to the accumulating 'puzzles' or 'anomalies', which are not comprehensible in the hitherto existing paradigm: "Ad hoc attempts are generally made to stretch the terms of the paradigm to cover them, but this gradually undermines the intellectual coherence and precision of the original paradigm" (Hall 1993: 180). As these attempts result in policy failures, they further delegitimize the previous paradigm. Then the discussions extend into a broader political and societal arena. Throughout this stage of political, academic and public debate, a new paradigm prevails and, in a final step, is institutionalized.
2.2 Explaining varying policy outputs
From a policy analysis point of view, it is not only important whether policy changed over a certain time. From a process-related perspective it is always also crucial to ask what caused this change (Schubert 1995). As it turns out, latest family policy reforms in Germany and Austria are tricky, but highly interesting cases in this respect. The two countries could be called least likely cases to implement system-shifting reforms: Both are 'conservative welfare states', with traditionally familialistic family policies and large Catholic populations (4), where political parties would be "expected to 'avoid blame' for unpopular political initiatives" (Weishaupt 2009). Besides, both countries are ascribed a low reform potential--due to, amongst others, social partners possessing informal veto positions and two big welfare state parties competing with each other (Obinger 2009). All the more, Germany (2005-2009) and Austria (2007-2010) were governed by grand coalitions during decisive years of the investigated period: Far-reaching reforms should not be expected under such circumstances, since family policy concepts of Social Democrats and Conservatives have in both countries traditionally differed substantially to the point of ideologization.
And yet, as Chapter 3 will show, substantial policy changes were conducted in both countries--and that, in fact, exactly during the years of grand coalitions. It will also be shown that the parental leave reforms of Germany and Austria differed substantially. These developments are in need of explanations.
One explanatory factor often given for modernizing and recalibrating reforms of welfare policies, is that of post-industrial problem pressures (cf. Bonoli 2001). Yet while socio-economic challenges in the context of demographic and familial changes have surely contributed, they do not offer satisfying explanations from a policy analysis point of view. Firstly, because "objective conditions are seldom so compelling and so unambiguous that they set the policy agenda or dictate the appropriate conceptualisation" (Majone 1989: 23). And secondly, since these challenges are highly similar for Germany and Austria (e.g. with regard to birth rates, female employment, childcare) they would not explain differing policy outputs. The same holds for structural and institutional approaches, which, however, lose explanatory power in face of speedy and significant policy changes anyway.
Power resources approaches too do not adequately grasp for family policy: On the one hand, the field is characterized by a pronounced fragmentation and weakness of family organizations (Gerlach 2005). On the other hand, those facing new social risks are a highly heterogeneous and weakly organized group (Bonoli 2005). Finally, also the 'parties matter' thesis does not seem to be of any help, at least at first sight: According to it, one should find more regressive family policies with conservative parties in power, and more progressive family policies with social-democratic parties in power. However, as will be seen, no far-reaching family policy changes were conducted by Germany's red-green government; their family policy was marked by a surprising continuity with the preceding conservative-liberal government's (Bleses 2003). Right to the contrary, the system-shifting reforms were implemented by a grand coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD and under the aegis of a Conservative family minister.
This might be related to a 'Nixon-goes-to-China' strategy, i.e. only as being a Christian-democrat, family minister Ursula von der Leyen might have been able to push the reform through against conservative resistances (Henninger and von Wahl 2010). This phenomenon is also addressed by Ross (2000), who argues that under the 'new politics' of welfare state restructuring, the effects of political parties are contingent and sometimes...
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