Popular Demand and Public Policy: The Case of Childcare Expansion in Germany

• In Event: Political Economy of Advanced Capitalism

Abstract

Many European governments have sought to modernize family policies and gendered patterns of labor market participation in their countries during the last decade; in fact, reconciliation of formal employment with care obligations in the family has been a de-clared European Union goal. There are two perceptions of this far-reaching policy shift: On the one hand a “policy responsiveness perspective”, which sees the family policy of many European countries responding to the changing needs of electorates, in which women’s voices and issues of care obligations and reconciliation policy have become more salient. On the other hand an “activist intervention perspective”, according to which political elites implement social investment policies and nudge their societies toward mod-ern family and labor market behaviors. While complementary to a certain extent, there are also diffences across time, policy fields, and political agendas of governments in the strength of one motif relative to the other.
Family policy change in Germany is a good case in point for studying the relative salience and the interplay of policy responsiveness and activist intervention. While implementa-tion of policy change was largely even across the country in the major cash transfer schemes for families with children, the same cannot be said with regard to social services, notably childcare services. Germany responded to the European Union’s social invest-ment strategy by launching initiatives and providing financial resources for the expansion of public childcare facilities, especially for children under the age of three, throughout the country. While overall nearly 33 percent of all children in that age group got access to public childcare by 2015, differences between the situation in the Eastern and the West-ern parts of the country are still dramatic. This paper documents this persistent discrepan-cy, and the diverging trajectories of childcare expansion in East and West Germany.
It then sorts through the different explanations for this uneven path toward broad child-care coverage and in doing so explores the relative stength of demand- and supply-side explanations, that is, polular demand vis-a-vis activist interventionism, accounting for East-West divide.
• Demand-side explanations focus on the socio-economic and cultural bases of gender regimes that shape parents’ behavior and that way the need for public childcare. Models of work and family, but also family- resources and other resources of infor-mal childcare arrangements are among the aspects that interest demand-side explana-tions, and the main dimensions of difference have indeed been the East-West distinc-tion in gender-, work-, and family-regimes.
• Supply-side explanations account for childcare expansion and its territorial variation in terms of the legacy of childcare policies in the two parts of the country as well as the diverging administrative resources and dynamics. The focus is on actors and insti-tutions of the political system, on the administrative and infrastructural resources that come into play when implementing federal policies at the regional and local levels, as well as, possibly, “cultural” or cognitive factors that influence political elite’s notions of the proper place of childcare, thus hindering or supporting the expansion of public childcare.
Studying this question of supply or demand improves our understanding of the causal factors underlying responsiveness or alternatively a more elite-driven policy develop-ment. It allows us to ascertain when and how popular demands become salient, but it also reveals when and how issues representation of citizens’ interests in this sense interact and interfere with concern for good governance and effective policy design in policy making and implementation. Examining the role of supply- and demand- factors in German childcare expansion also gives us insights into the ways in which reference to popular demand is being used by policymakers to support their policy agendas. Reconstructing the narrative of political communication during childcare expansion in Germany reminds us of the fact that voters’ voices and choices may be dreaded these days, but they are also maleable in strategies of political communication, and responsiveness a gesture rather than a reality.

Author

• Margitta Maetzke, Johannes-Kepler University Linz