449776
2012
ESP22410.1177/0958928712449776Mahon et al.Journal of European Social Policy
Article
Convergent care regimes? Childcare arrangements in Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden
Journal Of European Social Policy Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) 419–431 © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0958928712449776 esp.sagepub.com
Rianne Mahon
Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Anneli Anttonen
University of Tampere, Finland
Christina Bergqvist
Department of Government, Sweden
Deborah Brennan
University of New South Wales, Australia
Barbara Hobson
Stockholm University, Sweden
Abstract This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada). We find points of convergence around both themes at the level of policy discourse and continued diversity in the way these ideas are translated into actual policies. In other words, convergence is mediated by institutions and political realignments. Keywords childcare, neoliberalism, policy convergence, social investment Corresponding author: Rianne Mahon, Balsillie School of International Affairs and Department of Political Science, Wilfrid Laurier University, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 6C2. Email:
[email protected]
420
Introduction The transnational spread of neoliberal ideas has raised the possibility of convergence of different regimes around a liberal, market-centred norm. Recently, Jens Alber (2010) has drawn attention to a greater role for markets, greater individual responsibility and activation in Western European social policy, but this is largely confined to the level of discourse while differences between Europe and the US persist at the level of actual policies and programmes. Alber’s analysis, however, focuses exclusively on transfers, thus ignoring social services. It thus overlooks the increasing role of markets in relation to care services. At the same time, social services such as childcare have received increasing attention for their central role in welfare production and in addressing new social risks (Bonoli, 2006; Esping-Andersen, 2002). They thus figure prominently in the social investment discourse promoted by international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which envisages a positive role for social policy (Jenson, 2010). Our paper focuses on public support for childcare arrangements as a critical test of the way countries are responding to these social risks. We focus on two Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and two Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada).1 This enables us to explore trends to convergence – or continued divergence – within, as well as between, countries associated with two distinct types of welfare regime. On the one hand, Nordic countries have been under pressure to promote the marketisation of human services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘choice’. On the other hand, the social investment discourse, which calls for public investment in childcare to promote women’s employment and early childhood development as an investment in the future, challenges liberal countries to take on new social responsibilities. This raises the possibility that while the Nordic countries open up to a greater role for market provision and adoption of market-like mechanisms, the Anglo-Saxon countries accept a new role for states in the financing, regulation and provision of childcare services, leading to convergence, albeit with different trajectories.
Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) With or without public support, childcare is increasingly leaving the informal and domestic world of the household, although the latter retains an important role. It is therefore necessary also to consider state support for care of children in the home.2 In the heyday of the male breadwinner model, liberal states such as Australia and Canada provided social assistance for families lacking a male breadwinner, though that right to care was more strongly entrenched in Australia (O’Connor et al., 1999). This right has come under pressure as part of the broader agenda of ‘modernising’ social programmes, although Australia has continued to support sole parents’ ‘right to care’ and has extended this to low-income partnered parents. In contrast, lone parents in Finland and Sweden were never entitled to social assistance, but were expected to be earners using the same service and benefit systems as other families. Nevertheless in the mid1980s, Finland departed from Sweden with the introduction of the cash for care scheme as a possible alternative to childcare. The paper begins with a discussion of how to compare our four countries, drawing on welfare regime theory. The next section addresses the issue of convergence. Here we suggest that pressures for change are not reducible to the material dimensions of globalisation, nor to secular demographic trends such as population ageing. The ideational dimension of globalisation – that is, travelling policy ideas – also matters. Further, while regime theory’s pathdependency thesis may help to predict the intensity of the pressure to change as well as national responses to new challenges, politics also plays a role in determining policy outcomes. We thus support Hay’s contention that ‘policy-making, even in response to common external challenges and commonly perceived imperatives, is a highly complex and differentiated process, characterised by a succession of case-specific mediations’ (2004: 246). The subsequent sections examine key features of childcare provision in our four countries and recent changes thereto, beginning with Australia and Canada. Our final section returns to the main themes of inter and intra-regime convergence and divergence in policy discourse and design.
Mahon et al.
Locating our cases: welfare and care regime theory Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden are all rich countries with fairly well developed welfare protection systems and social rights for working citizens. Moreover, the labour force participation rate of women in all four is above the OECD average, ranging from 66 percent of 15–64-year-olds in Australia to 70 percent in Sweden. Despite the similarities, there are critical differences in social policy regimes (Anglo-Saxon liberal vs Nordic social democratic). Thus, in contrast to Schmitt and Starke’s (2011) quantitative analysis of 21 OECD countries, ours follows the tradition of comparing contrasting cases in greater depth. The countries exhibit enough similarities (social and economic characteristics) and sufficient differences (social policy regimes) to make the comparison of interest. Of course, use of regime typologies involves generalisation from actual policies and real-life arrangements, which can result in glossing over internal differences within actual national policy regimes. Accordingly we offer a finer grained analysis that brings out important intra- as well as inter-regime differences. The ideal-typical Nordic ‘social democratic care regime’ is based on certain historical premises (Kildal and Kuhnle, 2005). First, the principle of universality means that all citizens have access to social benefits. The politics of universality has been particularly important for women and the promotion of gender equality in the Nordic countries. The second characteristic of the Nordic regime is the central role of the state: the public sector is responsible for providing and financing services through taxation. Third, the social democratic parties and trade unions have historically been the moving force behind social policy development. In contrast, the liberal regimes like Australia’s and Canada’s assign key roles to labour markets and families, with the state’s role largely limited to providing assistance targeted at those least well-off. Castles and Mitchell (1992) have, however, argued that Australia should be separated from the liberal fold (1992). In contrast to Canada, where the Social Democratic party has been relatively weak at the federal scale, Australia has had a relatively strong
421 labour movement, although the Australian Labor party found it difficult to gain political office during much of the postwar period (1992:17).3 Clearly, placement of countries in regimes such as liberal, conservative and social democratic is far from a simple matter. Myles’ concept of intra-regime differentiation as reflected in programme design – the models used to finance and distribute benefits (1998: 341) – may help to nuance the analysis. Thus Castles and Mitchell’s description of the social policy configuration in Australia – for example, reliance on flat rate, means-tested but non-contributory support to the unemployed, irrespective of duration of unemployment, progressive taxation, and an industrial relations system that resulted in compressed wage differentials – can be seen as a particular programme design variant within the liberal family. In other words, while Esping-Andersen’s broad typologies would place Canada and Australia in one (liberal) category and Sweden and Finland in another (social democratic), such broad differences should not lead us to ignore intra-regime differences nor similarities in programme design that cut across regimes. Competing assumptions about gender relations can be reflected in intra-regime differences as well. Thus O’Connor et al. (1999) argue that Australia, Britain, Canada, and the US displayed important differences in gender assumptions. Like Britain, Australia strongly supported women’s domestic caregiving role and the means-tested programmes were based on family income in a way that discouraged women from seeking to become ‘second earners’. It was only in the 1970s that the Australian regime became a hybrid of the male breadwinner and gender equality models (Cass, 1994). In contrast, Canada, like the US, embraced the adult earner family, while offering meagre social assistance to lone mothers. With regard to Finland and Sweden, too, there are important differences with Sweden going the furthest in providing incentives for men to care, while Finland has sought to institutionalise the right to choose between working or staying at home with very young children (Bergqvist et al., 1999: 157). Differences have also been observed within care regimes just as they have within the broader welfare regimes in which they are embedded. In particular, care for young children and eldercare often follow
422 different paths within a regime and even within one country (Anttonen et al., 2003). Ideally, our comparison would therefore include both. We have chosen to focus on childcare arrangements, but the volume as a whole includes contributions that bring out developments within eldercare.
Convergence and/or path-dependent change? Thus far we have dealt with regimes as static, if complex, configurations. Nevertheless, as several of the articles in the Journal of European Social Policy’s Special Issue on family policy suggest, path-shifting changes are possible even in the supposedly ‘frozen landscapes’ of the Bismarckian continental regimes (Knijn and Saraceno, 2010). More broadly, Streeck and Thelen (2005) have criticised welfare regime literature for failing to recognise the way in which seemingly incremental adjustments can open the way to path-shifting changes. They suggest that the material pressures generated by liberalisation – ‘the secular expansion of market relations inside and across the borders of national political economic systems, significantly beyond the limits that the organisational capacities of postwar “mixed economies” had set for them’ (2005: 2) – are pushing coordinated market economies such as Finland and Sweden in a liberal direction. In social policy terms, this could involve the introduction of market-like mechanisms (‘consumer choice’) as well as outright privatisation of social service delivery. Pressures for convergence stem not only from economic integration, but also from the increased density and velocity of travelling policy ideas and the role of international organisations and transnational policy networks in disseminating these (Orenstein, 2008; Peck and Theodore, 2010). Much of the current research on the transnational flow of ‘best practice’ policies focuses on the European Union,4 but as our cases extend beyond Europe, the OECD constitutes a more useful referent, as it has been an important purveyor of policy ideas for countries like Australia and Canada as well as Finland and Sweden (Mahon and McBride, 2008; Martens and Jakobi, 2010). As various critics have suggested, since the late 1970s, the OECD’s policy advice has displayed a
Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) marked neoliberal character (Armingeon and Beyeler, 2004; Deacon et al., 1997; Dostal, 2004; McBride and Williams, 2000). This neoliberal policy orientation was maintained through the 1990s through the Jobs Strategy (McBride et al., 2008). The OECD’s Jobs Strategy in turn influenced the European Union’s stance (Noaksson and Jacobsson, 2003). Thus both the OECD and the European Union can be seen as adding to the pressure on the Nordic countries to adopt market-oriented solutions in the name of greater efficiency and choice. At the same time, however, the OECD’s Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs (DELSA) began to formulate what has come to be seen as the social investment paradigm (Jenson, 2010). The social investment paradigm stresses the need for a shift from ‘passive’, consumption-oriented measures to those with an ‘active’ orientation.5 In particular, drawing on scientific research on the development of the brain and economic analysis of the higher cost–benefit ratio of investment in early childhood development relative to adult training programmes, it stresses the importance of ‘the early years’ (Jenson, 2010), including state support for the expansion of childcare. All four of our countries participated in the OECD’s major studies, Babies and Bosses and Starting Strong, in which it developed the implications of its social investment perspective with particular attention to childcare. For Finland and Sweden, its advice largely confirmed the previous policy paths, while for liberal countries such as Australia and Canada its recommendations could mean the introduction of path-shifting reforms as the state is encouraged to take on new social responsibilities. Of course, it is possible for both sets of countries to respond to these challenges in path-dependent ways. Thus, for example, the Nordic social democracies might liberalise by opening up to non-profit providers (for example, parent cooperatives), while maintaining strong public sector provision and financing. In turn, countries with liberal regimes could clearly look to market-enhancing measures (provision of better information, demand-side subsidies) in formulating their social investment strategies. This suggests the need for a more nuanced view of convergence and Hay’s work helps to unpack the concept. Hay suggests four different possibilities (2004: 245). The simplest is convergence with a
Mahon et al. common trajectory. Thus, for example, the Nordic social democracies may respond to the pressures of liberalisation by enhancing the roles of markets in social care provision. Second, our countries might continue to adopt a social investment paradigm but in diverging, path-dependent ways. This would involve the least adjustment for the Nordic regimes due to their prior establishment of a policy framework supportive of the adult worker family. Although Australia and Canada come under pressure to provide public support for early child development and/or the reconciliation of work and family, they do so in ways consistent with a ‘market-friendly’ approach. Third, one could see divergence but with a common trajectory if the Nordic countries moved toward more market provision and the Anglo countries further deepened their reliance on markets. Finally, there is the possibility of convergence of the sort we have suggested, which combines a trend toward marketisation in the Nordic social democracies with a move on the part of liberal regimes to take on new public responsibilities for childcare provision. This would be an example of convergence, but no common trajectory. At the same time, while such patterns of convergence and divergence can partly be understood in terms of exposure to similar material and ideational pressures, institutional legacies and domestic political alignments play a critical role. It is therefore important to play close attention to such case-specific mediations.
Australia and Canada Regime theory would predict that Australia and Canada would respond to the growing need for extraparental childcare by leaving it to families to purchase what they could afford on the market. Public support would largely come in the form of subsidies to lowincome families, although there would be some initiatives designed to stimulate a broader market for childcare. Moreover, as both have federal state structures, it is likely that there would be strong regional differences in the extent and form of provision. It is therefore not surprising that, in both, the state’s role has largely been confined to supporting the development of a market for care. Yet Australia did not start out on this path and there have been
423 several moments when Canada, too, seemed poised to adopt a childcare policy modelled on social democratic lines. These initiatives, however, were launched well before the social investment paradigm had made its appearance, which leaves open the possibility of pathshifting initiatives over the last decade. Thus the 1972 victory of the Australian Labor party brought into office a government committed to broad social reforms, including preschool education. In response to criticism by its feminist allies, the Whitlam Government used the previous government’s Childcare Act, introduced in its dying days in office, in ways that broke with a liberal policy mould. Rather than relying on demand-side instruments such as vouchers, it offered capital and operating grants limiting these to non-profit, centre-based childcare, provided by qualified staff. It also used Section 81 of the Constitution to bypass the states, offering federal funding directly to community organisations, regional authorities and local governments. This made it possible for the federal government to support the development of a truly pan-Australian system, although states remained responsible for pre-school education. Australia’s liberal turn only began in the 1990s, again under a Labor government, which abandoned the use of supply-side instruments in favour of subsidies to families and opened the way to federal funding of for-profit childcare. This pro-market orientation became more pronounced under the conservative government that allowed and even encouraged the accelerated development of ‘big box’ corporate childcare. Under these favourable conditions ABC Learning became not only the largest childcare company in Australia but, by 2006, was the largest publicly listed childcare provider in the world (Brennan, 2007). The Australian Coalition government’s policy also combined classic liberalism in the form of targeted subsidies, with support for the male breadwinner family or a modified version thereof. Thus the (family) income-tested Childcare Benefit is available to all users, including traditional male breadwinner families. Moreover, although the subsidy is sufficient to reduce the share paid by parents to 31 percent on average (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2006), it is insufficient to cover the
424 costs of infant and toddler care. This provides some incentive for mothers of young children to stay at home or to rely on informal care (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2002: 20). The focus on women as mothers is deeply (though not unambiguously) embedded in Australian institutions and values and has been reflected in the debates about paid maternity/parental leave in which prominent individuals have resisted the International Labour Organisation’s definition of maternity leave as leave from paid work, insisting that motherhood itself, rather than absence from employment, should be the basis of entitlement to support. Thus it is only recently that the Labor government has introduced a legislated parental leave programme.6 In Canada, too, in the late 1960s feminist mobilisation and the continuing rise in women’s labour force participation rates created pressure for the adoption of a pan-Canadian childcare programme, but the response bore a marked liberal cast. The federal Liberal government rejected the call of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women for a national daycare act, choosing instead to reform the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) in ways that extended the possibilities for cost-sharing childcare subsidies with the provinces. Federal funds could be used to contribute to capital costs and the reforms established a bias in favour of non-profit provision that is still visible in most provinces. At the same time federal involvement remained targeted on those ‘in need’. More importantly, unlike the Australian federal government, the Canadian government chose a cost-sharing arrangement that let the provinces decide whether and to what extent to participate. This has resulted in a veritable patchwork of childcare.7 The Canadian government did, however, introduce paid maternity leave in 1971, which was later expanded to both parents.8 This reflects a more whole-hearted – if liberal – embrace of the adult earner model than in Australia. Thus Australia and Canada had established a childcare policy orientation prior to the ascendance of the social investment discourse. While the rise of neoliberalism contributed to the Australian Labor government’s decision to switch to a liberal path in the 1990s, it was the conservative coalition that really deepened the marketisation of Australian childcare. Canada’s neoliberal turn in the 1980s resulted in the
Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) non-adoption of childcare legislation, as the Conservative government allowed its bill, which would have extended funding to for-profit centres, to die in the face of opposition from childcare advocates and their allies. In the 1990s, it was pressure to reduce the growing deficit and public debt that led to the elimination of the CAP in favour of a new (and much reduced) block fund. The social investment discourse has had an impact on developments over the last decade, however. In Australia it had a marked impact on the Labor party’s (successful) 2007 election campaign. The party argued that ‘investing in human capital formation delivers significant benefits to individuals, society and the economy. International research demonstrates that earlier investment yields a higher rate of return.’ The new Labor government was quick to use the Council of Australian Governments (COAG; an important new body designed to co-ordinate intergovernmental arrangements) to negotiate a new national quality framework and a ‘national partnership agreement on early childhood education’ to provide 15 hours a week of pre-school education for all children in the year before they start school. The new initiative did not, however, challenge the predominance of forprofit provision. Moreover, while the new agenda focuses on the child and includes ‘respect for diversity and difference’ there is not a single reference to parents as labour force participants or to the older gender equality ideas. The new national childcare strategy is framed solely in terms of children’s needs and national competitiveness. In Canada, the spread of the social investment discourse encouraged the federal government to take incremental steps9 toward the creation of a panCanadian system of early education and childcare, culminating with the ‘QUAD’ – quality, universality, accessible and developmental – bilateral agreements concluded with all ten provinces in 2005. The release of the OECD’s Starting Strong report on Canada in 2004 added impetus to the Liberal government’s decision to negotiate these agreements, but it also reflected the impact of ongoing mobilisation of childcare advocates, the enlistment of experts on the importance of the ‘early years’, and, not the least, the Francophone province of Quebec’s adoption of its ‘$5 a day’ universal childcare policy in 1997. While
Mahon et al. Quebec’s programme was modelled on similar principles to the Nordic model (Jenson, 2002), the federal government’s initiatives left it open to the provinces to choose whether to continue to focus on the demand side as well as whether to include forprofit providers. These incremental steps, moreover, came to an abrupt halt with the election of a Conservative government in January 2006. As the Conservatives have eschewed social investment discourse and policies, it has been left to the provinces to translate a social investment discourse into practice. Some have done so, expanding full day pre-school (kindergarten) to all 5-, and in some cases, 4 to 5-yearolds, but as in the past not all provinces are prepared to do so.10 Thus the Australian and Canadian childcare policies have ultimately continued to follow – or in the Australian case, turned onto – a liberal path even when Labor and Liberal governments adopted a social investment discourse. At the same time, the twists and turns visible in both cases suggest that even when countries stick to a path consistent with the basic assumptions of their welfare regimes, such paths offer numerous forks or choices, some of which – Australia in the 1970s, the francophone province of Quebec in 1997 – can veer in a social democratic direction. When underlying gender assumptions are taken into account, this further complicates the possible outcomes. Thus while Canada did embrace a liberal variant of the adult earner family in the 1970s, a strong maternalist legacy persisted in Australia despite the efforts of feminists to challenge it.
Finland and Sweden In line with the broader principles of the Nordic social democratic regime, Finland and Sweden established national childcare systems based on the principles of universality and publicly financed and largely publicly provided quality care and they did so in the 1970s, well before the formation of a transnational social investment discourse. Even though both have unitary state structures, however, the achievement of these ambitions required provision of fiscal incentives to the municipalities, which enjoy considerable autonomy in both countries, and national legislation requiring the
425 municipalities to provide childcare to all children whose parents want it without reasonable delay.11 There were, however, important differences between the two systems that reflect in part the greater strength of the rural-based Centre (formerly Agrarian) party in Finland (Haataja and Nyberg, 2006). This is not to suggest a simple correlation between Social Democratic government and this form of childcare policy. For instance, in Sweden during the 1960s there was opposition to a universal, publicly funded and provided childcare system from Social Democratic politicians as well as those in the Centre party and this persisted at the local level into the 1970s. It took pressure from feminists in the unions and the Social Democratic and Liberal parties to shift the balance. In the 1970s, grassroots mobilisation and a cross-partisan alliance of feminists underlay the Swedish government’s offer of more generous incentives to get the municipalities to expand centre-based care rather than the cheaper family daycare (Hobson, 2003). Now, more than 90 percent of Swedish children currently receive centrebased care (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2004) in contrast to Finland where 48 percent of children under the age of 3 years and 30 percent of children from the age of 3 years to starting school (at 7 years) are in family daycare. In both countries, rural-based Centre parties, where neo-maternalist and gender sameness ideals co-exist, favoured the introduction of a Child Home Care Allowance (CHCA). In Finland, the Centre party was strong enough to insist on the inclusion of such an allowance in the 1985 childcare legislation and parents also got the right to a care leave until the child reaches the age of 3 years. While the OECD’s Babies and Bosses lauded the policy for enabling parents to choose, it was critical of the way it encouraged parents – primarily mothers – to withdraw from the labour market for a long period. In addition, it noted that ‘with the central government covering 30 percent of the spending on both Home Care Allowance and a childcare place, and the former costing less than half of the latter, municipalities have a very strong financial incentive to discourage parents of young children from using childcare’ (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2004: 114). In fact, many municipalities have offered substantial top-ups
426 to the national CHCA. As a result participation of Finnish children under the age of 3 years in childcare is substantially lower than in Sweden.12 There is a clear class difference, moreover, in use of the CHCA: three out of four mothers with less education used the benefit versus one-third of women with university degrees (Sipilä et al., 2010). For both countries, the subsequent incorporation of a social investment discourse largely fit with the path already established, requiring only incremental steps. Thus for instance in 1996 responsibility for Sweden’s childcare policy was shifted to the Ministry of Education and in 1998 a national age-appropriate curriculum for children aged 1 to 5 years was adopted. In 2002 the Swedish government also obliged the municipalities to offer the children of the unemployed or with parents on leave a place in childcare for at least 15 hours a week and expanded access to preschool. Since 1998 all Swedish children have the right to attend preschool for 15 hours a week in the year before they start school. In 2003 this was expanded to include provision of universal, free preschool for all 4- and 5-year-olds. Since 2000 Finland has offered a preschool place to all children in the year prior to starting school and in most municipalities management of childcare has been removed from social welfare to education. The incorporation of social investment discourse, however, has altered the rationale for ECEC so that women’s rights increasingly take a second place to the rights of children. This is clear in the current Finnish debate on a draft proposal for a new Children’s Daycare Act, where the focus on quality improvement is justified in terms of the best interests of the child. Social investment rhetoric has also been used to justify the shift in emphasis from care to education. The spread of neoliberal ideas poses a greater challenge to the Finnish and Swedish systems and there have been changes to both systems in the direction of marketisation. In Finland the first step in this direction was taken in 1985 as parents were allowed to use the CHCA to purchase private care, although nearly a decade later only 5 percent of recipients was doing so (Rostgaard and Friedberg, 1998: 25). In 1997 a private daycare allowance was introduced by a Social Democrat-led coalition and since then there has been a steady increase in the use of private care allowance,
Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) such that by 2009 those using the allowance accounted for 8 percent of formal childcare. While the share of private care remains modest, the system government supports for private care could lead to more intensive marketisation of care services as has taken place in eldercare (Anttonen and Häikiö, 2011). In Sweden, too, for-profit care has made an incursion, although this was not without resistance. In the early 1980s, an offshoot of the Swedish Employers Association created a childcare company, Pysslingen, and tried to expand by starting in Stockholm area municipalities that had bourgeois party13 majorities. The national (social democratic) government responded by passing a law that opened the way to financing nonprofit childcare – thus expanding ‘choice’ – while closing the door on for-profit ventures. In the early 1990s, however, the bourgeois coalition government introduced legislation permitting the use of public funds to finance for-profit provision and when the social democrats returned to office they did not reverse this. Non-public provision has subsequently expanded at the expense of the municipally run childcare centres, reaching 19 percent across the country and 26 percent in the big ciities in 2010 (Skolverket, 2011: 13-14). Initially non-profit providers, especially parent cooperatives, constituted the vast majority of non-public providers but forprofit care has expanded so that it now accounts for nearly half of the non-public places. Another contested issue was the bourgeois parties’ proposal to introduce a tax deduction for purchase of household services, including nannies, which feminists and parties of the left saw as an attempt to reintroduce a system of domestic service. The election of a bourgeois coalition government in 2006 paved the way for the 2007 introduction of such tax subsidies – justified as a way to enable women to participate equally in the labour market and to reduce the time squeeze among adult earner families. Usage doubled between 2008 and 2009 and preliminary figures suggested that it would increase by as much in 2010 (Sköld and Heggeman, 2011). While for the most part the deduction was used for eldercare, twoparent families with children, especially in the highest income brackets (top 25 percent) were also among the main users. Anecdotal evidence suggests, however, that it is not used to replace centre-based
Mahon et al. childcare but to hire babysitters to collect the children and look after them until parents return from work. Thus childcare in Finland and Sweden has been subject to a degree of liberalisation, allowing for greater reliance on markets and, especially in Finland, on families (mothers) to provide for care of very young children. This turn was not generated simply by the material pressures generated by economic liberalisation; it was also made possible by political re-alignments. In Finland, no single party was able to achieve the hegemonic position held by the Swedish social democrats from the 1930s to the start of this century. This helps to account for the early and successful introduction of the CHCA as well as for the opening to private care provision in the late 1990s. In Sweden, these changes have been made possible by the end of the Social Democrats’ hegemony as the key changes were introduced by bourgeois coalition governments.
Conclusions Within the regime literature the Social Democatic (Nordic) and Liberal regimes have been placed at opposite ends. From that perspective, one could argue that we see some convergence: Canadian and Australian regime types appear to have incorporated elements of a social investment policy frame and the Nordic countries have edged toward a neoliberal free choice model. The contingent nature of these shifts does not, however, indicate a change in policy frames: historical legacies and institutionally embedded policies and discourses are not easily dislodged. Hence in Canada and Australia, social investment strategies are bounded by neoliberal frames of free choice. In Australia, the profit sector remained entrenched even after the Labor party returned to office. This is not to say politics does not matter: in Canada, important steps taken under the banner of social investment were reversed with the election of a Conservative government in 2006. As the two Nordic countries show, liberal formulas have not undermined the support for social investment in childcare. That certain discourses and policies are anchored in the broader policy framework, rooted in path dependencies in policy logics and legacies, is not
427 surprising. This is supported by a body of comparative studies of gender, care and welfare states. The cases are interesting, however, because they reveal the discontinuities, shifting boundaries in the public/ private mix of care and the discourses underpinning them. The historical accounts of childcare do not show a linear movement, but rather twists and turns: contested politics and competing discourses along the two axes of social investment and neoliberal marketisation. Finally, we discern that the responses to global pressures and travelling policy paradigms are dynamic and less predictable than theories of path dependencies assume. Hence our comparative analysis reveals both fault lines that prevent and interrupt change, while at the same time recognising that, under favourable political conditions, transnational diffusion of best practice could produce seismic shifts. Hay’s contingent convergence thesis offers analytical purchase for understanding and interpreting the trajectories in our cases. Ideas used to legitimate policy may seem to show convergence, yet their translation in different policy contexts varies. For example, choice, a core discourse in the neoliberal turn, is mediated by how it is embedded in different policy matrices and the cognitive filters in different societies. Choice exists in Finland and Sweden through the co-existence of a regulated private sector with a larger high quality subsidised public childcare. There is also an important limitation on the amount parents must pay. In the Nordic countries, parents pay no more than 20 percent of the costs of childcare in comparison to an average of 30 percent for Australia and 50 percent for Canada. Within Canada and Australia, choice fits into the standard neoliberal formula of market options, although the support for non-profit alternatives has been encouraged at different points in time. Our comparisons have also revealed interesting intra-regime variations in programme design that to a significant extent reflect differences in gender assumptions. Thus, Canada has embraced the adult earner family more than Australia, even though it provides limited support for childcare. The high level of marketisation of Australian childcare and significant co-payments and family-based tests to determine the level of subsidy combine with deeply
428 rooted assumptions about maternal roles to make it difficult for mothers of young children to be employed on a full-time basis. There are also important differences between Sweden and Finland. While both have institutionalised a universal right to childcare, in Finland the inclusion of the CHCA institutionalises a right to choose whether to work (full time) or stay at home with children until they are three. The design of the state transfer, in turn, provides an incentive for municipalities to encourage families (that is, mothers) to do so. Interpreting the twists and turns in policy formulas, Hay and other neo-institutionalists recognise the primary role of politics and polities. The four cases demonstrate the potential importance of political actors in initiating or back-tracking on a course of change. In Australia the Labor party’s electoral breakthrough in the 1970s provided an important opening for feminists and other childcare advocates, while in Canada, the Conservative government put the brakes on a key federal childcare initiative. In Finland and Sweden, coalitions of the centre-right facilitated the introduction of policies that allowed for more choice, such as the home care allowance that was introduced in both countries. Nevertheless, convergence in policy (care allowance) can produce divergent outcomes as they are forged and implemented in different contexts. Thus the relative weakness of the Finnish Social Democrats and the strength of the Centre party influenced the generosity of benefit and supported its more widespread use than in Sweden. Returning to the question posed at the outset of this analysis – are the Nordic becoming more liberal while the Anglo-Saxon states take on new social roles – the four cases suggest the need for analyses of within regime differences and within country differences (for example, the exceptional status of Canada’s francophone province of Quebec). The gendered implications of choice in relation to social investment and market strategies reveal divergences and diversity within regime types and within societies. The right to care and the residue of a maternalist ideology constrain the current Social Democratic government in Australia. In Canada, there has been more support for the two-earner model and non-profit forms of childcare: yet in both
Journal of European Social Policy 22(4) the cost of childcare places makes it more difficult to combine work and caring for women. Turning to Finland and Sweden, we find differences among women in the utilisation of these policies. In Sweden, the vast majority of those taking advantage of the new options for choice in care are middle- and upperclass urban families. There is very low take up of care allowance among Swedish mothers whereas in Finland significant numbers of women are using the care allowance, especially those with less education. Finally, Hay also suggests that regional differences need to be taken into account when analyzing neoliberal tendencies. Social investment has been a salient discourse in the EU and has resulted in specific directives and targets for childcare places. The Nordic countries have been held up as examples of best practice. The institutional embeddedness of these policies is strengthened within the EU framework. Furthermore, within the EU framework, policies promoting women’s labour force participation and work–life balance in families are presented as the optimal choice, justified in terms of efficiency, productivity, gender equality and family coherence (Hobson and Fahlén, 2010). This kind of rhetoric can be called upon by those seeking to resist marketisation. Such European discourses travel across continents, and the OECD has played a role here, but as Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby (2004) suggest, the Anglo-Saxon countries may be more prone to look to each other for policy learning. Notes 1. For a comparison of the use of ‘social investment’ discourses in family policy in liberal (British) and Continental (Germany) see Jüttner et al., 2011. 2. We do not, however, examine parental leave programmes. See Ray et al. (2010) for a good overview of parental leave schemes. 3. Castles and Mitchell’s classificatory exercise frequently located Finland in the liberal quadrant, reflecting the relative strength of the agrarian/centre party and the division of the parties on the left that forced social democratic governments into coalitions with other parties. 4. See for example Verloo, 2005 and Annesley, 2007. 5. Although some would argue that the social investment paradigm is best seen as part of a broader process of
Mahon et al. neoliberalisation (Craig and Porter, 2004), it also envisions a positive social policy role for the state. 6. Offering 18 weeks of paid leave to eligible parents, the programme is of short duration and, offering a flat rate (federal minimum wage) benefit, offers little incentive to the often higher-paid father to take some of that leave. 7. Rates of provision of regulated spaces for children aged from 0 to 5 years old range from a low of 9.5 percent in Saskatchewan to a high of 41 percent in the tiny province of Prince Edward Island, with the Canadian average at 20.3 percent (Beach et al., 2008: 183). 8. Since 2001, the parental leave portion has been expanded to 35 weeks but the rate of remuneration remains low – 55 percent of insurable earnings, with a fairly low ceiling of $39,000 per annum, and there is no paternal quota. 9. See Mahon and Collier (2008) for more detail. 10. Three provinces introduced full day preschool for 5-year-olds in the 1990s and in 2010–2011 three more provinces, including populous Ontario and British Columbia, followed suit. 11. Finland in fact created a legal entitlement to a place in 1985. 12. In 2008, 70 percent of Swedish children between aged 1 to 2 years and 97 percent of children aged 2 to 3 years were in formal childcare, whereas in Finland 42 percent of those under 2 years and 73 percent of children aged 2 to 3 years were in formal childcare. 13. In Sweden, none of the centre-right (called ‘bourgeois’) parties – the Conservative, Liberal and Centre parties – have been strong enough to govern on their own at the national level and in most municipalities.
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