Social investment by women? Contesting policy paradigms on
the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state
***
Janna Goijaerts
26 July 2019
Master thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (research)
in Political Science and Public Administration
Word Count: 10668 (including references) Student number: s2087669 Supervisor: Dr. Natascha van der Zwan Second Reader: Prof. Dr. Jet Bussemaker
i
Abstract
Scholars often assume that policies fall harmoniously under the umbrella of one policy paradigm. This paper addresses the situation in which policy paradigms contest each other, when it comes to the treatment of one societal group. Policies of the Dutch state conflict on the gender dimension of the welfare state. The government wants to increase female labour participation, while also wanting a bigger slice of care services to be provided by citizens. These contesting policies have cumulated in the decentralization of long-term care (LTC) in the Netherlands in 2015. I use a multi-level method including a discourse policy analysis and a focus group with gaming elements to explore the policy paradigms and the policy context of the gender dimension of the welfare state in the cabinet period of the LTC reform. This study finds that distinctive conservative care ideas colour the social investment paradigm in the Netherlands, explaining the seemingly inconsistent policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state. Namely, the social investment paradigm in the Netherlands takes the form of social investment by women with the Dutch government urging a need for higher labour participation and higher care participation simultaneously, assuming that it is possible to combine both. The tension between gender equality and this policy strategy is not confronted head-on by the Dutch government, given that the Ministry of Health frames its policies gender blind and the involved ministries fail to cooperate meaningfully on the gender dimension of the welfare state.
1
1. Introduction
1The social investment state has received considerable attention in recent comparative welfare state scholarship. Researchers agree that developed welfare states are converging to social investment states (e.g. Giddens, 1998; Van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012; Morel, Palier & Palme, 2012; Hemerijck, 2017). The social investment strategy has even been explained as a new welfare state paradigm dictating social policies in Western Europe (Hemerijck, 2018). The social investment state aims to reduce the impact of the new social risks such as employment flexibility and demographic ageing by introducing future-oriented, preventative social policies next to traditional social security (Hemerijck, 2018: 815-816). This new paradigm arguably replaces the famous typology of Esping-Andersen (1990).
Given path dependency it is unlikely for different welfare states to converge to a social investment state without maintaining some distinctive features. Especially the conservative-corporatist welfare states are a ‘least likely case’ for the shift towards the social investment paradigm. Conservative-corporatist welfare states are, more than the other welfare state types, reliant on the male-breadwinner model, meaning that care is provided by women. The conservative-corporatist welfare state is therefore also referred to as the ‘welfare-without-work’ type (Esping-Andersen, 1996). The social investment state, by contrast, hinges on the maximization of labour participation by men and women in order to create a wide tax-base for a sustainable welfare state.
The conservative-corporatist welfare state and the social investment state contradict each other most on the gender dimension of the welfare state. What I call the gender dimension of the welfare state is the way the welfare state divides responsibilities for paid labour and unpaid care and includes three policy domains, namely the caring dimension of the welfare state (e.g. Knijn & Kremer; 1997), labour policies regulating the combination of work and care activities, also called work-family policy (e.g. Lewis, 2009), and emancipation policies with the goal of gender equality in work and care activities.2 Whereas in the conservative-corporatist welfare state women are care givers, in the social investment state care is provided by the state or the market to stimulate women to participate in paid labour. When studying the social investment turn in conservative-corporatist welfare states, the gender dimension of the welfare state is thus highly relevant.
1 I want to thank my supervisor and second reader for their input and helpful comments, the focus group
participants for their willingness to be part of this research, and Hannah Bliersbach and Rozemarijn van Dijk and the other Research Master students for their invaluable support.
2 The term ‘emancipation policy’ is specific to the Dutch case and may not be familiar in the international context.
The Netherlands has a ministry department working on gender equality, amongst other emancipatory goals. They create their own policies and are therefore part of the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state.
2 Scholars of the welfare state describe the Netherlands as a case of a corporatist-conservative welfare state shifting to the social investment paradigm (Van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012). Nonetheless, the policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state are ambiguous. The Dutch government wants to increase female participation in paid work, a strategy fitting the social investment paradigm. Typical social investment strategies include work-family policy such as increasing investments in childcare and expanding leave regulations (Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 2016). The state simultaneously wants a bigger slice of care services to be provided by citizens (Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, 2014). The reduction of welfare state expenses by activating citizens to provide informal care and stimulating greater citizen responsibility and self-reliance is a typical neoliberal policy (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013: 423). Thus, parallel to the investment in childcare and stimulation of labour participation, there is a puzzling opposing shift to the promotion of subsidiarity in elderly care (Van Hooren & Becker, 2012). Dutch women, who often work part-time3 and spend more time giving informal care than Dutch men, are expected (by the government) to work more, whilst also providing more informal care. The ambiguous policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state in the Netherlands potentially negatively affect Dutch women4, as the Netherlands Institute for Social Research warns (Dirven & Portegijs, 2016). In short, the current ambiguity in childcare and elderly care policies is as such: stimulating subsidiarity in long-term care would mean “going back in time and recreating the female employment problems that have just been softened by the increase of childcare facilities” (Van Hooren & Becker, 2012: 104).
Instead of being drawn from a coherent welfare state paradigm, social policies concerning the gender dimension of the welfare state in the Netherlands thus seem to contest each other. According to Peter Hall’s (1993) famous conception of the policy paradigm, policies within a state are based on an underlying framework of ideas about the nature of policy problems and potential solutions. Moreover, according to Hall’s definition, the ideas within the framework that is the policy paradigm “interlock to form a relatively coherent whole” (Hall, 1992: 91-92, emphasis added). Hence, the policy paradigm concept strongly implies that policies within a state are consistent with each other. Dutch policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state thus challenge policy paradigm theory. From the research puzzle follows the question that I will aim to answer: How do policy paradigms shape the policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state? In answering this question, I will explain the Dutch ambiguous policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state from a
3 In the Netherlands in 2015, 73% of working women had a part-time job, compared to 21% of working men
(Dirven & Portegijs, 2016: 66).
4 The Netherlands ranks number 56 out of 149 countries on the ‘Economic participation and opportunity’ category
3 discursive institutionalist perspective and gain insight into the mechanisms of the social investment paradigm in a least-likely case, namely a country with a conservative-corporatist male-breadwinner institutional history. The discursive institutionalist perspective is most appropriate for this research, because the ideational and cultural embeddedness of welfare regimes are related to social and gender inequality (Béland, 2009: 567-568). Feminist social policy research emphasizes the important role of ideational processes (Béland, 2009; Padamsee, 2009). The discursive emphasis can shed a light on the peculiarity of labour-care gender inequality in the Netherlands that cannot be explained by interest-representation alone.
The paper proceeds as follows. First, I present a critical evaluation of the use of typologies and paradigms in welfare state research. Next, I introduce an innovative multi-level research design to study policy paradigms and discourses on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state. I find that distinctive conservative-corporatist features colour the social investment paradigm in the Netherlands, explaining the seemingly inconsistent policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state. Namely, the social investment paradigm in the Netherlands takes the form of social investment by women with the Dutch government urging a need for higher labour participation and higher care participation simultaneously, assuming that it is possible to combine both. The tension between gender equality and this policy strategy is not confronted head-on by the Dutch government, given that the Ministry of Health frames its policies gender blind and the involved ministries fail to cooperate meaningfully on the gender dimension of the welfare state.
2. The Social Investment Turn in Conservative Welfare States
Welfare state scholars regularly use Esping-Andersen’s (1990) prominent typology to motivate their case-selections and substantiate their outcomes. The three types of welfare states (liberal, social-democratic, conservative-corporatist) refer to different logics of providing welfare to citizens and organizing solidarity in political systems, emanating from countries’ distinctive cultural and historical developments. In the past decade, however, scholars in the field of comparative welfare state research have come to agree that there is a trend of welfare states to converge to the social investment state (Hemerijck, 2017).
Social investment is the new prominent kid on the block of comparative welfare state research and has even been named a new welfare state paradigm. Anton Hemerijck (2018), leading scholar in the social investment literature, applies Peter Hall’s (1993) concept of the policy paradigm to this welfare state regime. Hemerijck (2018) defines three welfare state paradigms, namely a Keynesian, neoliberal and social investment paradigm. The Keynesian welfare state requires a strong state that engages in counter-cyclical macro-economic policy to ensure
4 employment for male-breadwinners who in case of no employment receive social security to compensate for the family-wage. The neoliberal paradigm is a critique on the Keynesian welfare state, arguing that the trade-off between equity and efficiency is too big to be maintained. So, the Keynesian welfare state was deregulated, liberalized and privatized, resulting in less rights to social security for citizens (Hemerijck, 2018: 824). Welfare scholars often take the paradigmatic shift from Keynesian to neoliberalism in welfare state policies as a given (White, 2012). They argue that European welfare states are converging towards a social investment state as a strategy to minimize dependency on welfare, with the aim of sustaining welfare arrangements for the future (e.g. Giddens, 1998; Van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012; Morel, Palier & Palme, 2012; Hemerijck, 2017).
Given path dependency it is unlikely that different welfare states converge to a social investment state without remaining some distinctive features. Especially the conservative-corporatist welfare states are a ‘least likely case’ for the shift towards the social investment paradigm that researchers in comparative welfare state have identified. Conservative-corporatist welfare states are, more than the other welfare state types, reliant on the male-breadwinner model, meaning that care is provided by women and men perform paid labour. The conservative-corporatist welfare state is therefore also referred to as the ‘welfare-without-work’ type (Esping-Andersen, 1996). The social investment state, by contrast, hinges on the maximization of labour participation by men and women in order to create a financial foundation for a sustainable welfare state. It is therefore on the gender dimension of the welfare state that the conservative-corporatist welfare state and the social investment state contradict each other most.
Feminist scholars have criticized both the conservative-corporatist welfare state and the social investment state. Esping-Andersen’s (1990) seminal work largely ignores (the care provision by) women. The ignorance of the unpaid care work provided by women leads to a secondary citizenship for these women who do not earn an income and therefore have no appeal to rights connected to having an income (Lewis, 1992; Orloff, 1993). The social investment paradigm does include gender and the informal care work of women by emphasizing the importance of female labour participation and thus stimulating welfare state schemes to stimulate women (and men) to work and facilitate the combination of paid labour with the necessary care activities over the life-course. However, feminist critique also applies to the social investment state. In the social investment state female labour participation is valued mostly for economic reasons and not for the goal of the emancipation of women in itself. The boosting of labour participation in this way, delegitimizes the caring roles of women as valuable activities in their own right (Saraceno, 2017).
5 A feminist perspective on welfare states thus requires the incorporation of models of care in research to extend the existing theory on welfare state paradigms. There are two ideal types of care that Kremer (2007: 30-31) metaphorically describes referring to two fairy tales. In social democratic and feminist traditions, the care paradigm is ‘Cinderella’. In the Cinderella paradigm care is considered to be work that deserves payment, or, in case of informal care, a burden that keeps women from working, just as the poor Cinderella who is forced to spend her time doing unpaid care work for her step-family. This care paradigm complements the social investment paradigm that idealizes professional care as a way of increasing labour participation and, in case of childcare, as an investment in human capital of young children. In the ‘Snow White’ care paradigm, informal care is seen as a joy for the caregiver and a gift to society, just like the princess Snow White who enjoys caring for the seven dwarfs. This care paradigm complements the Christian democratic tradition with its communitarian ideals and the (neo)liberal tradition which idealizes independence of the state and responsibility of the family for social reproduction (e.g. White, 2012). The question that is raised in this study is whether these welfare state and care paradigms are being applied consistently in policy-making in the Netherlands.
2.1 Paradigms and Critics
In this paper, I will apply the scholarship of policy paradigms to study the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state. Since the adoption of the paradigm concept – originating from Kuhn’s (1962) description of the scientific paradigm – in policy scholarship, the concept has had broad appeal. Yet, as most widely used concepts, it has also been criticized. The literature on policy paradigms was born out of the combination of historical institutionalist and ideational theory. Peter Hall applied this concept to the economic policy domain and defined the policy paradigm as an “overarching set of ideas that specify how the problems facing [policy makers] are to be perceived, which goals might be attained through policy and what sorts of techniques can be used to reach those goals. Ideas about each of these matters interlock to form a relatively coherent whole” (Hall, 1992: 91-92). This ‘ideational turn’ in institutionalism has been argued to constitute a ‘new institutionalism’, namely ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt, 2008). The assumption in this ideational perspective is that actors’ preferences and beliefs are socially constructed. Ideas function as independent causes of reform, because they can serve as new concepts for legitimizing policies that make it easier to change institutions (Cox, 2001: 474).
Even though the ideational perspective is now widely known and used in political science, there are still some thorny issues within this branch of scholarship including issues with the policy paradigm concept (Béland & Cox, 2010; Berman, 2013). Two related issues concerning policy
6 paradigms are ambiguity and agency. First, a policy paradigm is theorized as being inherently consistent, yet “ambiguity is a natural feature of political discourse and more specifically of policy frameworks” (Jobert, 1989: 380). Ambiguous political conceptions are more easily adopted, because different actors can give their own interpretations to these conceptions (Jobert, 1989: 380). Given that policy paradigms are conceptualized as internally consistent frameworks of ideas, but political life is inherently ambiguous, the question arises as to what extent there is space in the policy paradigm concept for ambiguity.
The second issue concerning policy paradigms is the perspective on agency; on individuals operating within these paradigms, such as policy makers. Peter Hall’s (1993) seminal work on policy paradigms is an extension of the scholarship that ‘brought the state back in’. The implication of this perspective of ideational power is that policy paradigms are internalized by the state actors and as such determine policies. This perspective thus views the state as a unitary actor in terms of ideas – there can only be one paradigm – and is rather static – only a rare paradigm shift can overhaul policymaking. Criticism has been raised against this state-centred perspective by an agency-oriented perspective. According to the agency-oriented perspective, the problem with policy paradigms is twofold. First, paradigms are defined as incommensurable, which means that actors cannot think outside the presiding paradigm. Second, actors do not possess a critical sense of the ideas they hold in the theory of policy paradigms, thus removing the drive for change from agents (Carstensen, 2011: 149).
In Hall’s theoretical perspective the policy maker is a ‘paradigm man’ – or woman - who deduces political solutions from the paradigm he follows. Instead, it is more realistic to assume that ideas are carried by individuals and are not static, and that ideas are discussed amongst individuals in an interactive process using discourse to give body to the ideas they carry (Schmidt, 2008: 306). Another conception of agency within policy paradigms based on this critique is that of the ‘bricoleur’, who is far more pragmatic than the paradigm (wo)man. The bricoleur combines bits and pieces of different paradigms that allow him to “answer multiple logics simultaneously” (Carstensen, 2011: 158). The bricoleur is thus an actor who ‘muddles through’, which is intuitively a more realistic picture of a policy maker than one who acts only based on a system of internalized ideas (Carstensen, 2011: 158). Furthermore, policy change through bricolage is more continuous, whereas policy change via paradigm shifts entails critical junctures (Carstensen, 2011: 160). Thus, whereas on the macro-level of the state a paradigm is theoretically consistent, the ambiguity of policy paradigms may be found at the micro-level of the individual policy maker.
7 In what follows, I will study the multilevel consistency of the social investment paradigm by analysing the recent long-term care reform in the Netherlands from a discursive institutionalist perspective. The Dutch long-term care (LTC) scheme had for long eroded the responsibility of adult children (mainly women) to take care of their ageing parents, thereby supporting female employment (Lewis, 2002). The Netherlands was one of the first countries with a universal LTC insurance system (Schut & Van Den Berg, 2010). In 2015, almost half a century after its initiation, the universal LTC insurance scheme was dissolved. This policy change was implemented to put a stop to the increasing costs of LTC. Instead of a universal insurance scheme, LTC has been decentralized and informal care is again seen and used as a potential source of care instead of public provided care for the elderly.5
The Netherlands is a conservative-corporatist welfare state in which the social investment turn has been identified (e.g. Van Kersbergen & Hemerijck, 2012), but this recent long-term care reform highlights a conflict on the gender dimension of the welfare state that in light of the abovementioned theories is relevant to study. As explained in the introduction, policies regarding work and care on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state seem to conflict. The Dutch government wants to increase female participation in paid work, a strategy fitting the social investment paradigm. Yet the reduction of welfare state expenses by activating citizens to provide informal care and stimulating greater citizen responsibility and self-reliance is a typical neoliberal policy (Verhoeven & Tonkens, 2013: 423).
Policies in the Netherlands do not only contest each other on the welfare state paradigms, but also on paradigms of care. The trajectory of childcare and elderly care policies in the Netherlands is remarkable. Childcare and elderly care policies in the Netherlands are both based on a different care paradigms whereas these two types of care policy domains are normally in synchrony (Van Hooren & Becker, 2012). Whereas childcare in the Netherlands used to be based on the Cinderella paradigm, and elderly care on the Snow White paradigm, a shift in both care domains towards the other care paradigm has been taking place over the past decade (e.g. Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, 2016; Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, 2014). In conclusion, the logic of two contesting welfare state paradigms and care paradigms can be applied to Dutch policies, even though the theory describing welfare state and care paradigms implies that the ideational framework underlying these policy domains should be coherent. The social investment turn may thus be ambiguous and should be critically analysed for ambiguous policies can stratify social outcomes, in this case disadvantaging women.
5 The Dutch case is the odd one out, as the general development seen in European states is the expansion of the
coverage provided for LTC services and a tendency to guarantee a more universalistic right to care to dependent citizens (Pavolini & Ranci, 2008).
8
3. Research Design and Methods
Research for this project was conducted by studying individual policy makers in an interactive focus group discussion, by examining policy documents and by taking into account institutional context, using discourse analysis as an overarching approach. A discourse gives meaning to phenomena through language and concepts, and steers the way policy actors perceive reality, define problems and choose solutions (Hajer & Laws, 2008: 261). This analytical method has the ability to integrate structure (institutions) and agency (individuals) (Hajer & Laws, 2008: 254; Schmidt & Radaelli, 2004: 192). Rather than trying to generate general laws, discourse analysis is used to illuminate mechanisms in policy practice (Hajer & Laws, 2008: 262).
There is a wide array of approaches within discursive institutionalism. The study of paradigms (e.g. Hall, 1993; Blyth, 2002) tends toward the more positivist approach. In this approach interests are defined by ideas. Hence ideas are a necessary condition for collective action (Schmidt & Radaelli, 2004: 195). As mentioned, critics have argued that whereas on the macro-level of the state a paradigm may be theoretically consistent, the ambiguity of policy paradigms may be found at the micro-level of the individual policy maker. For this project paradigms have been studied at the level of the individual policy maker using an innovative serious game and at the state-level by studying policy documents.
This research combines a deductive positivist approach of coding paradigm elements (see Appendix A) with more interpretative analysis. To interpret the discourse of policies I focused on the symbolic devices of policy as described by Stone (2012). Symbols are persuasive and carry the important feature of being able to portray ambiguity in policy. Stone (2012) identifies several types of symbolic devices. Especially narrative stories as a symbolic device are emphasized in discourse studies as they form the “backbone of every discourse” (Van der Steen, 2009: 22). Once accepted, narratives “attain an almost sacred status and may come to dominate the field” (Hendriks, 2011: 223). Narrative stories have also been used to study Dutch pension policies and wage restraint policies (Van der Steen, 2009; Hendriks, 2011).
Two types of analysis have been used to code the focus group transcript and the policy documents: (1) with a content analysis I have identified the paradigm elements (See Appendix A) and (2) with a narrative analysis I have identified the narrative stories (See Appendix B). Given the particular interest in how a corporatist-conservative welfare state like the Netherlands implements the social investment paradigm, it is important to analyse not only what paradigm elements are referred to in the policies, but also the narrative with which these policies are implemented, in order
9 to uncover the mechanism by which the social investment paradigm shapes policies in this conservative welfare state.
Finally, Schmidt and Radaelli (2004: 205-206) argue that to address the influence of discourse on policy, scholars should not only study the substantive content of policy (ideas), but also the interactive discursive processes and institutional context in which policy is made. Hence the term ‘discursive institutionalism’ (Schmidt & Radaelli, 2004: 197). That is why this research incorporates direct input from policy makers gained in a focus group. All three important elements (discourse analysis, interactive process, and institutional context) are covered in this research.
The trustworthiness of this qualitative research (e.g. Krefting, 1991) is enhanced by the triangulation of sources (i.e. focus group and policy documents), and by using a coding manual for the analysis of the focus group transcription and the policy documents (See Appendix B). The selection of a ‘least likely case’ for social investment policies, namely a corporatist-conservative welfare state like the Netherlands, provides interesting insights about the interaction between the social investment paradigm and conservative care ideals and its impact on policy outputs. This is socially relevant for gender equality in these conservative states.
3.1 Micro-level: Focus group with gaming elements
I studied how policy makers deal with policy paradigms in a focus group with gaming elements. The aim of this method is to observe to what extent policy makers have internalized a coherent paradigm (paradigm (wo)man) or mix and match components of different paradigms (bricoleur). Different actors of the policy making process were present in this meeting to recreate the interests that are presented in the policy process: civil servants working at the three ministry departments on the gender dimension of the welfare state were represented by one senior policy maker from the Ministry of Social Affairs and Employment (SZW), one senior policy maker from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sports (VWS), and two senior policy makers from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). Apart from these civil servants, two interest group representatives (emancipation and informal care) and one policy advisor from an independent government council were present6. The information gathered in the focus group has been processed anonymously, but reference to the different (types of) organizations in which the policy makers work is made in the analysis.
6 In what follows, I will refer only to the policy makers from the ministries as civil servants, even though technically
the policy advisor is also employed by the government and therefore also a civil servant. To the other participants I will refer to either as interest group representative or policy advisor. I will use the term policy makers to refer to the group of focus group participants in total.
10 The method consists of a deductive as well as an inductive element. The deductive element has features similar to a serious game7. Participants in a serious game play the processes that take place in reality in abstracted form, but of course the serious game will not reach the complexity of the real-life situation (Vissers, Heyne & Peters, 1995: 179, 181). Serious gaming can be used as a deductive quasi-experimental analytical method to recreate a complex real-life situation in abstracted form to research the behaviour of participants. The policy makers were asked to order twenty cards with statements containing elements from different paradigms from agreement to disagreement (similar to the Q-method approach) (See Appendix C). The game thus results in different paradigm grids for individual policy makers. The analysis of the deductive gaming element is an analysis of paradigm grids. When comparing these paradigm grids, the researcher can observe whether policy makers have individually internalized a specific paradigm, and also what type of policy makers cohere to what paradigm.
This deductive element is combined with an inductive element in the form of a focus group discussion about the results of the game in which policy makers could give meaning to and discuss in their own discourse their associations with policy paradigms and the policy process in general. One of the reasons why the focus group is preferred over an interview is because policy makers often work in teams instead of individually when creating policies. Focus groups are inherently social in nature (Cyr, 2017: 1038), just like policy making is. The focus group discussion was recorded and transcribed, before being coded and analysed on paradigm elements (See Appendix A) and patterns in the focus group discussion (Saldaña, 2009: 6).
3.2 Macro-level: Policy document analysis
To study policy paradigms at the macro-level of policy making, I have analysed nineteen policy documents from the period 2012-20178, the cabinet period in which the liberal-labour government decentralized long-term care and the conflicting paradigms are thus most apparent (See Appendix D). The policy documents that were analysed are letters from ministry departments involved in
7 A pilot of the method was performed with a group of seven Master students, PhD students and Professors. A few
changes to the method were made on the basis of this pilot. One, the statements were adapted so that they are more value laden and easier to interpret. Two, the paradigm game is played individually before participants get the opportunity to discuss their results with a colleague participant to see whether participants make each other conform to the ideational framework of the organization or whether the ideational framework remains individual. Finally, colour codes for the paradigms have been put on the back of the cards with statements, so that when participants play the game they are not primed by the colour codes.
8 These documents were selected using a database of the Dutch government on the basis of the type of document
(‘Kamerbrieven’), the period (cabinet Rutte II period), a code for each of the three ministry departments as the source of the document, and the Dutch translation of ‘work’ and ‘care’. This selection method delivered 34
documents of which 15 were deselected because they consisted of procedural information only or the policy topic of the document was not to the interest of this research. Other policy documents have been used for this research, but they have not been coded in the same meticulous manner.
11 policymaking on the gender dimension of the welfare state (long-term care policy (VWS), labour policy (SZW), emancipation policy (OCW)) to Parliament (‘Kamerbrieven’). These policy documents are written by policy makers in the ministry department and thus directly convey the discourse at the ministerial level. The focus group participants also work at these specific departments, increasing the comparability of the micro-level and macro-level findings.
The documents have been analysed on the basis of the discourse analysis approach. First, a qualitative content analysis was used to reduce the data to chunks of code each representing a paradigm element (see Appendix A) (Flick, 2014; Schreier, 2014). Policy paradigms are defined as interlocked frameworks of policy problems, goals and techniques to reach those goals (Hall, 1992: 91-92), suggesting a certain causal interpretation. Apart from the presence of separate paradigm elements, the argumentative connections between these elements have been analysed, focusing on goals, problems and solutions in the policy documents, as suggested by Stone (2012). In addition, the narrative stories used to convey the policies were analysed (Stone, 2012) (See Appendix B).
4. From Paradigms to Stories: the Discourse on the Gender Dimension
of the Dutch Welfare State
In the Netherlands a coordinative discourse is decisive for policy making (Hendriks, 2011). Corporatist countries provide the context for a strong coordinative discourse (discourse among policy actors) in contrast to a communicative discourse (discourse between policy actors and the public) (Schmidt, 2008: 303). This coordinative process of policy making can also be traced in light of social investment policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state and the recent structural reform of long-term care in the Netherlands that are of interest for this paper.
The social investment turn in the Netherlands has been possible because of a strong consensus between mainstream parties and trade union and employers’ organizations (Hemerijck & Van Kersbergen, 2019). The ‘welfare-without-work’ state became unsustainable, so the tax-paying population needed to increase. As late as 1971 the Netherlands still had the lowest female labour participation rate in Europe (Visser, 2002: 26). The massive entry of Dutch women into the labour force in the early 1990s was possible only because of the changing status of part-time work. In that period, policy actors, especially trade unions, normalized part-time work with pension rights and collective bargaining (Hemerijck & Van Kersbergen, 2019). Even though the activation idea originally sprung from social democratic origin, subsequent conservative governments never really challenged the activation turn (Hemerijck & Van Kersbergen, 2019). The increase in female employment generated further societal and political demands for improvements in policies of
12 reconciling work and care responsibilities, such as childcare and parental leave (Hemerijck & Van Kersbergen, 2019).
The main guideline adopted by the Dutch government for policies in the field of labour and care since the 1990s is the combination model: citizens choose their own personal mix of (part-time) paid labour and (part-(part-time) care activities (Plantenga, 2002: 54). Due to the long tradition of private informal care, full outsourcing and/or commercialization of care has never been a serious policy option in the Netherlands. That is why the combination model is so typically Dutch. It is a combination of extending the employed population, whilst making the opportunity to privately care accessible in every citizen’s life (Plantenga, 2002: 62). The Dutch economy is now based on a one-and-a-half income model, in which mostly men work full-time and mostly women work part-time. In the Netherlands in 2015, 73% of working women had a part-time job, compared to 21% of working men (Dirven & Portegijs, 2016: 66).
In 2012, a new liberal-labour coalition was faced with deficits higher than the EU 3% norm as an immediate effect of the financial crisis. A fiscal austerity programme was launched including structural reforms (Hemerijck & Van Kersbergen, 2019). Major cuts in childcare expenditure caused a decline in childcare uptake and a shift to informal care provision. But these cuts have been repaired in subsequent years when financially better times arrived. The structural reform of the LTC system, however, was a broadly supported measure in preparation by policy advisers and politicians for many years and seems unlikely to be reversed by any coalition government in the near future. The LTC restructuring was framed as an inevitable solution to the unsustainably high costs of the traditional LTC insurance system and changing social and demographic dynamics. The tendency that has been playing out for several years to “reduce the scope of the provisions covered by the national [long-term care] insurance system and allocate them to domains of social policy governed by less solidaristic, more discretionary and subsidiary principles” has come to full completion in 2015 (Da Roit, 2012: 8).
This recent LTC reform is the core of the ambiguity of the policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state. Dutch policies regarding female social participation are still far from coherent. Several government watchdogs, interest groups, official councils and the media have recognized this tension (e.g. Van der Klein & De Gruijter, 2013; Josten & De Boer, 2015; De Boer, De Klerk & Merens, 2015; Atria, 2015). The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP) warns that with more responsibilities for care transferred to society due to the new LTC scheme and a majority of women still working part-time, the suggestion that women will take up this extra responsibility seems very reasonable, because working hours and hours spend on care work are
13 communicating vessels in Dutch society (Dirven & Portegijs, 2016: 75). This tension is not faced head-on by the Dutch government. The next two sections of this paper will explain why.
4.1 Paradigms
The social investment turn has strongly left its mark on the discourse of Dutch policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state, contrary to the expectations that a conservative-corporatist welfare state would be the ‘least likely case’ to conform to this new paradigm. In the documents of all three ministry departments – labour policy (SZW), long-term care (VWS) and emancipation (OCW) - there is a social investment discourse, albeit that the discourse is very strong in SZW and OCW documents and weaker in VWS documents (See Table 1). The most pronounced social investment elements are the gender equitable emphasis in OCW (64 codes) and SZW (36 codes) documents, and the life-course contingencies element in the SZW (65 codes) and VWS (22 codes) documents. The higher employment element and the human development element of the social investment paradigm are also well represented in the policy discourse of the Dutch government. The in the literature suggested social investment turn in the Netherlands is thus confirmed by the discourse of Dutch policies.
The serious game done with policy makers during the focus group session confirms the evidence from the discourse in the policy documents, contrary to the ‘bricoleur’ thesis. Without exception the individual policy makers agreed most strongly with the social investment paradigm and disagreed most strongly with the neoliberal paradigm, suggesting that policy makers have indeed to some extent internalized the social investment paradigm. In other words, the social investment turn in this conservative-corporatist welfare state can be confirmed for the micro-level as well as the macro-level, suggesting more multi-level coherence of paradigms than paradigm-critics have suggested (e.g. Carstensen, 2011). This research finds that the policy maker may actually be a ‘paradigm (wo)man’.
The lack of neoliberal discourse in the policy documents and serious game suggests that there is no direct conflict between the social investment paradigm and the neoliberal paradigm in Dutch policies. A few neoliberal elements have been coded in the VWS documents, connected with the structural reform of LTC in the Netherlands in times of financial crisis. Indeed, this structural reform was paired with budget cuts. Yet a typical neoliberal discourse that could have been used to support these budget cuts, like the importance of fiscal discipline and the efficiency of laissez-faire policy, is not strongly apparent. It should be noted, however, that the discourse in the VWS documents is gender-blind, which is an element belonging to the neoliberal paradigm.
14 But the absence of gender arguments could not be coded and should therefore be taken into account separately.
Table 1: Amount of coded paradigm elements per type of policy documents Cinderella Paradigm Snow White Paradigm Neoliberalism Paradigm Social Investment Paradigm VWS (informal care) 8 documents 24 70 10 38 SZW (labour relations; combining work and care) 6 documents 2 6 0 142 OCW (emancipation) 5 documents 1 0 0 111 Total 27 76 10 291
Indeed, the documents of the Health Ministry (VWS) show a rather different paradigm discourse in comparison to the other two ministry departments. Whereas SZW and OCW have a very strong social investment discourse, the discourse of VWS is diffuse and care paradigms are more prominent. It is remarkable that instead of the Cinderella paradigm, that would complement the social investment paradigm discourse of the other ministry departments, the Health Ministry engages in a discourse of Snow White care, that would conflict with the goals of the social investment paradigm. The care discourse in the VWS documents contains the Snow White elements which articulate the importance of informal care for society (27 codes), emphasize that informal care is given on the basis of free will and with the motivation of reciprocal relationships (16 codes), and underscore that informal care complements formal care and makes care provision of higher quality (13 codes). Even though the Cinderella paradigm is well represented in the
15 discourse of the Health Ministry as well (24 codes), the main Cinderella element used in these documents is the acknowledgement that informal care is a possible burden for the care giver (19 codes).
This diffuse pattern of care paradigms is also confirmed at the level of individual policy makers. Whereas policy makers with a portfolio focusing on gender-equality agreed more with the Cinderella paradigm, the policy makers concerned with long-term and informal care agreed more with the Snow White paradigm. Overall, policy makers had more extreme opinions about the welfare state paradigms and more neutral opinions on the care paradigms.
The following conclusions can be drawn on the analysis of welfare and care paradigms in policy discourse at the micro- and macro-level. First, whereas Dutch policy makers have internalized the social investment paradigm, they seem to be ‘bricoleurs’ when it comes to care paradigms. Second, the evidence suggests a social investment turn in the discourse of Dutch ministry departments and individual policy makers. The source of ambiguity of Dutch policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state is not a neoliberal discourse of fiscal discipline. Instead, a Snow White discourse of the importance of informal care for society conflicts with the ideals of the social investment state. Finally, these results suggest discourses and paradigms within a state are coherent vertically, from macro- to micro-level, yet can differ per policy domain, horizontally.
4.2 Stories
How can this out of the ordinary combination of the social investment paradigm with the Snow White paradigm be synthesized in the discourse of the Dutch government? The answer is found in the arguments – the stories – used in the policy documents and the policy context in which these stories were created by the policy makers.
In the discourse of the policy documents (SZW and VWS), the opportunities and the necessity, not the threats, of combining paid work with informal care are highlighted. There is a clear story of change used in these documents asserting that society is changing and informal care is necessary to adapt to demographic ageing and changing standards for quality of life of the elderly. Hence, more informal care is necessary to improve the long-term care system. At the same time a high level of labour participation forms the basis for a sustainable welfare state. Since higher levels of labour participation and informal care are necessary simultaneously, the combination of work and care activities is becoming more important. The tension between the call for more labour participation and more informal care that is signalled in feminist literature on the welfare state, but also by policy advisors, interest groups and media in Dutch society9, is not confronted head-on by
16 the Dutch government. The following quotes are representative of this story of change told in SZW and VWS documents10.
I am convinced that the quality and sustainability of long-term care hinges on the way in which every person, to their own ability, contributes to the support of vulnerable people (VWS, 30169-28, p. 2)
For the quality of our society it is of increasing importance that people get the chance to optimally develop themselves and maximally participate in society. In view of demographic ageing it is desirable to utilize the labour potential as good as possible. At the same time, people increasingly grow old in their own homes, which increases the importance of the informal care giver for their frail relatives (VWS, 30169-40, p. 2; similar SZW, 32855-15, p. 2).
The main policy goal of the cabinet is to create the conditions that enable employees to keep taking responsibility for combining labour and care. (…) My ambition is thus to develop policy with the aim of improving the alternatives, so that the choice to give care does not automatically come with the choice to work less (SZW, 32855-14, p. 4).
The emancipation directorate of OCW is the odd one out in the policy discourse and policy context of the gender dimension of the welfare state in the Netherlands. The emancipation directorate is a small department whose main output is subsidizing programmes to improve gender equality and gender mainstreaming in other policy domains. The discourse in the OCW documents is not gender-blind, of course, since these documents contain emancipation policies, yet the discourse in these documents is focused on labour participation much more than on informal care.
Sometimes policies are developed by other ministries, of which we think ‘this is an obvious gender-related theme’, whilst other departments do not yet see it that way (senior policy maker OCW).
A social investment paradigm, as present in the Dutch policy discourse, implies an active government. Yet the responsibility of individuals, employers, employees and municipalities is
10 The document numbers cited as source of the quotes are the official document serial numbers for the documents
17 emphasized as much as government responsibility in SZW and OCW documents and even far more than government responsibility in VWS documents. I argue that the story told here is a variety on the story of power as defined by Stone (2012), namely a story of whose responsibility it is to face certain issues. In this story of responsibility, the distinctive characteristic ‘subsidiarity’ of the conservative-corporatist welfare state is articulated. The story claims a shared responsibility with the central government as coordinator and other organizations and individuals as responsible agents. For instance, to combine work and care is seen as the responsibility of individuals, between partners in a household, and of organizations, between employers and employees (see quotes below). The role of the government is not to impede on the decision to combine work and care, but to actively facilitate and create ways in which individuals can make this combination. The policy documents of all ministry departments also appeal to a wider cultural shift in society, on the one hand on the topic of gender equality and the necessity for women to gain economic independence, and on the other hand on the importance and the necessary appreciation of informal care. Again, this is seen as a process the government needs to facilitate with awareness programmes and national campaigns.
An increasing pressure on the combination of labour and care means that it can become harder to create work-life balance. (…) In the first place it is of course up to the individual – whether or not in consultation with family members for example – to further detail this matter (SZW, 32855-14, p. 4).
The combination of labour and care is in the first place a task for the employer and the employee: they can best settle on customized arrangements that meet their mutual needs (VWS, 30169-40, p. 3; SZW, 32855-15, p. 5).
The only cooperation that has taken place between the three ministry departments was also based on subsidiarity, namely it was geared towards stimulating municipalities to enact the decentralization of long-term care in a gender sensitive manner.
On the policy domain of informal care we have only cooperated with VWS and SZW to increase employers’ understanding of informal care and to create awareness for more sensitive policies, but nothing concerning a different position of the national government on the topic, we did not do that (senior policy maker Emancipation directorate, OCW).
18 Evidence from the focus group discussion reveals a lack of cooperation between the actors involved in creating the policies stimulating female labour participation, and the policies stimulating informal care. This policy context explains the ambiguous policies. According to the civil servants in the focus group, the common goal of increasing labour participation by OCW and SZW stimulates cooperation between these two ministries. This cooperation has been institutionalized as civil servants of both policy departments meet every three weeks in a coordinated manner. But there is no institutionalized cooperation between OCW and SZW on the one hand and VWS on the other hand on the gender dimension of the welfare state, because common goals and shared problems are not recognized. Informal care is seen as a more or less separate policy domain, whereas a common goal is deemed necessary for collaboration.
I am under the impression that on this policy domain we collaborate especially with SZW and less with VWS, we do have contact with them but … (senior policy maker OCW). I think that informal care is a more delimited dossier (senior policy maker VWS).
With VWS you don’t naturally have similar interests, because they think ‘we are not against more labour participation, but that is not our policy goal, our goal is to keep rising healthcare costs within limits’ for example, these policy goals are just a bit contrary to each other and that is of course not the case with labour participation and emancipation (senior policy maker OCW).
Whereas the evidence from the focus group conversation shows the presence of silos in the work of civil servants, it also demonstrates that the interest group representatives and policy advisor have a more comprehensive policy perspective. They recognize the societal tensions resulting from the current policy-framework and identify a “moral appeal” (representative of informal care interest group) made by the Dutch government: “thou shall care for each other” (policy advisor from government council). According to them, the shift of responsibility from central government to municipalities and citizens has causes a lot of “anxieties” (representative of informal care interest group). A representative of the interest group for gender equality raised the issue that gender in general is a hard topic to get political attention for in the Netherlands: “in the Netherlands we are not as open minded about women’s emancipation unfortunately”, making it more difficult to create sustainable policies in this domain. Hence, these interest group representatives called for a long-term vision to “steer expectations of people” (representative of informal care interest group).
19 The civil servants working at the ministries acknowledged the necessity of a long-term vision. However, they see it more as their task to execute political decisions, instead of cooperating to create a long-term sustainable vision. The civil servants emphasized that they are constrained in what they can do by the coalition agreement that heavily determines policy in the Netherlands and by the money allocated for the policies they have to work on. All focus group participants expressed that the power of the political actors in policy making is strong, and that these political actors in many cases stay true to their ideational heritage when it comes to policy change preferences. The focus group participants agree there is a tension between two roles of the civil servant: the one of neutral bureaucracy serving their political bosses, the other of serving society with sustainable knowledge and vision that surpasses political cycles.
In my experience with the coalition agreement the agreement is so detailed that you actually have no space at all to, well you can fill in the details, but not the main part. And it needs to happen fast and sometimes we say to the Minister we can also try so and so, but then they say ‘yes but I will never get my coalition partners to agree to that’. Most of the times you can write the story, because that is not in the coalition agreement. That is also nice, argue why this is a good policy plan and why we have to do it in this way (senior policy maker SZW). Maybe we are a bit too well-behaved in the way we follow the priorities of the Minister (senior policy maker OCW).
In conclusion, the discourse of the social investment paradigm and the Snow White paradigm in Dutch policy documents is accompanied by a story of change that emphasizes the necessity of more informal care and the importance of combining work and care activities for the future of the welfare state. The tension between work and care activities is not ignored in the policy discourse, but the storyline does not confront this tension head-on. Instead, the discourse emphasizes positive and hopeful aspects of the combination of work and care, arguing that informal care givers who are appreciated and supported can persist in their task combination, and that the engagement in informal care does not necessarily lead to a decrease in labour participation. Secondly, the discourse of the social investment paradigm and the Snow White paradigm in Dutch policy documents is also accompanied by a story of responsibility that emphasizes the shared responsibility of central government as facilitator and coordinator, and organizations and individuals as responsible agents with freedom of choice, linking to the principle of subsidiarity that is distinctive for conservative-corporatist welfare states.
20 The focus group provided insight in a policy context that is characterized by silos on the gender dimension of the welfare state, a lack of emphasis on gender, and the lack of ability to create a long-term vision that would surpass political cycles on this matter. In ideational literature the societal and political elites - bureaucrats, academia, media, business groups - are defined as important actors of ideational institutional change (Hall, 1993; Blyth, 2001), not democratic political actors. But here we actually find that elected political actors from political parties with strong ideational heritage are most influential in policy making.
This particular combination of discourse elements suggests a distinctive way in which the Dutch welfare state has made the social investment turn. The Dutch government engages in a gender blind discourse masking a social investment by women strategy that emphasizes on the one hand the need to keep the welfare state sustainable by facilitating the combination of work and care to increase labour participation, especially by Dutch women who often work part-time, and on the other hand emphasizing the importance of informal care for the sustainability and quality of the long-term care system and the responsibility of individuals, employers and employees, and decentral governments to make the combination of work and care possible. Social investment by women may be the distinctive conservative-cooperative species of the social investment state.
5. Discussion and Conclusion
The results of this study show that welfare state paradigms do not conflict in the Dutch welfare state, as the social investment turn is confirmed at the macro-level in the discourse of policy documents and at the micro-level by the paradigm internalization of individual policy makers. However, instead of the expected Cinderella care paradigm to complement this social investment paradigm, the Snow White care paradigm is dominant in Dutch policy. The ambivalence in policies on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state springs from a simultaneous stimulation of paid labour and unpaid care, made possible by the combination of these two paradigms. The important influence of the care paradigm shows that the social investment paradigm with its focus on financial sustainability and labour participation leaves room for ambivalent policies on the gender dimension of the welfare state in the care domain. This may especially be the case in conservative-corporatist welfare states with a history of the dominant male-breadwinner model. A distinctive type of social investment that can be found in the Netherlands is social investment by women, in which a social investment strategy is combined with a focus on informal care and subsidiarity. Participation and activation strategies may thus in a more conservative context be interpreted not only to apply to labour but also to care. When combined with a gender-blind perspective, this can lead to female unfriendly policy.
21 The ambivalence in policy also springs from a difference in discourse and paradigm between ministries at the horizontal level. Counter to expectations, the use of paradigms is similar on a vertical axis from the macro-level discourse in policy documents to the micro-level internalization by policy makers. Instead, the ministry department concerned with informal care has a discourse of Snow White care, whereas the ministry departments on labour policy and emancipation policy have a discourse of social investment. These differences between paradigms and discourse on the horizontal level obstruct cooperation between ministries to face this complex issue. Civil servants acknowledged that there is no institutionalized cooperation between the informal care department on the one hand and the labour and emancipation departments on the other, since the informal care policy domain is seen as a separate domain striving towards different goals that could not be reconciled with the policy goals of the other departments.
This research aims to critically reflect on the mechanisms of paradigms at multiple levels and how they affect policy outcomes on a domain that crosses paradigmatic boundaries. To do so, this research has treated paradigms as mutually exclusive for the deductive part of the method. Like any ideal type, paradigms are not mutually exclusive in real-life. Given this limitation, this research finds that where paradigms differ, cooperation between ministries is a challenge and not even sought. As a result, a coherent vision on the gender dimension of the Dutch welfare state has not been created. This research signals a need to look at the state not as unitary actor when it comes to policy paradigms. It forces researchers to take a closer look at the different ministries and departments cohering to different paradigms to find the ambivalence in policies. It is the task of politicians, civil servants and arguably political scientists to discover these gaps in discourse and find ways to bridge policy domains in order to create a more sustainable policy vision.
This research also informs the debate on dualization. Dualization is the process by which policies increasingly differentiate rights and entitlements of different groups (Emmenegger et al. 2012, 10). Whereas dualization research initially focused on traditional class-divisions, some scholars have started to look at this process through an intersectional lens, amongst others incorporating a gender perspective (e.g. Van Hooren, 2018; Carbonnier & Morel, 2015). More specifically, these scholars argue that countries in Continental and Northern Europe, including the Netherlands, have set up specific policies to promote the development of household services. Yet these policies have had a dualizing effect by creating low-skilled and low-value work in domestic and care services, reinforcing social gendered and ethnic divides. I suggest that the shift to more informal care in the Netherlands could also be seen as part of this dualization process. Instead of creating low-skilled, low-value jobs, the stimulation of informal care is pushing certain societal
22 strata to non-employment, at least part-time. Hence, in the dualization debate both formal and informal care work should be taken into account in future research.
The developments signalled in this paper have important implications for gender equality in the Netherlands. Even though the tension between the stimulation of labour participation and informal care for women has been signalled by media, policy advisors and interest groups, the Dutch government, including its civil servants, does not confront this tension head-on. Instead, the new coalition government in the Netherlands is continuing the stimulation of informal care, since broad political support exists for this policy. The Dutch government thus needs to operate with care and confront the fact that its’ social investment strategy with conservative care elements is not gender blind, but actually a strategy of social investment by women.
23
Bibliography
Atria. (2015). De nieuwe mantelzorger v/m: Bouwstenen voor een gendersensitief mantelzorgbeleid. Retrieved from https://cdn.atria.nl/epublications/IAV_B00109634.pdf
Béland, D. (2009). Gender, Ideational Analysis, and Social Policy. Social Politics, 16(4), 558-581. Béland, D., & Cox, R.H. (2010). Introduction. In Béland, D., & Cox, R.H. (Eds.), Ideas and Politics
in Social Science Research. Oxford University Press.
Berman, S. (2013). Ideational Theorizing in the Social Sciences since “Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State”. Governance, 26(2), 217-237.
Blyth, M. (2001). The Transformation of the Swedish Model: Economic Ideas, Distributional Conflict, and Institutional Change. World Politics, 54(1), 1-26.
Blyth, M. (2002). Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge University Press.
Carbonnier, C., & Morel, N. (Eds.) (2015). The Political Economy of Household Services in Europe Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carstensen, M. (2011). Paradigm man vs. the bricoleur: bricolage as an alternative vision of agency in ideational change. European Political Science Review, 3(1), 147-167.
Cox, R. (2001). The Social Construction of an Imperative: Why Welfare Reform Happened in Denmark and the Netherlands but Not in Germany. World Politics, 53(3), 463-498. Cyr, J. (2017, October). The Unique Utility of Focus Groups for Mixed-Methods Research. Paper
presented at Profession Symposium: An Agenda for Mixed-Methods Research. American Political Science Association.
Da Roit, B. (2012). The Netherlands: the struggle between universalism and cost containment. Health and Social Care in the Community, 20(3), pp. 228-237.
De Boer, A., De Klerk, M., & Merens, A. (2015). Vrouwen, mannen en de hulp aan (schoon)ouders. Den Haag, Nederland: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau.
Dirven, H., &, Portegijs, W. (2016). Arbeid. In Portegijs, W., &, Van den Brakel, M. (Eds.) Emancipatiemonitor 2016. Den Haag/Heerlen: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau/Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek.
Emmenegger, P., Häusermann, S., Palier, B., & Seeleib-Kaiser, M. (2012). How we grow unequal. In Emmenegger, P., Häusermann, S., Palier, B., & Seeleib-Kaiser, M. (Eds.), The age of dualization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
24 Esping-Andersen, G. (1996). Welfare states without Work: The Impasse of Labour Shedding and Familialism in Continental European Social Policy. In Esping-Andersen, G. (Ed.), Welfare States in Transition: National Adaptations in Global Economies. SAGE Publications Ltd.
Flick, U. (2014). Mapping the Field. In Flick, U. (Ed.). The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Giddens, A. (1998). The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Hall, P. (1992). The Movement from Keynesianism to Monetarism: Institutional Analysis and British Economic Policy in the 1970s. In Steinmo, S., Thelen, K., & Longstreth, F. (Eds.), Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, P. (1993). Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25(3), 275-296.
Hemerijck, A. (2017). The Uses of Social Investment. Oxford University Press.
Hemerijck, A. (2018). Social investment as a policy paradigm. Journal of European Public Policy, 25(6), 810-827.
Hemerijck, A., & Van Kersbergen, K. (2019). Transformative Welfare Reform in Consensus Democracies. Politics of the Low Countries, 1(1), 44-62.
Hendriks, C. (2011). The story behind the Dutch model: the consensual politics of wage restraint. Oisterwijk: Uitgeverij BOXPress.
Jobert, B. (1989). The Normative Frameworks of Public Policy. Political Studies, XXXVII, 376-386.
Josten, E., & De Boer, A. (2015). Concurrentie tussen mantelzorg en betaald werk. Den Haag, Nederland: Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau.
Knijn, T., & Kremer, M. (1997). Gender and the Caring Dimension of Welfare States: Toward Inclusive Citizenship. Social Politics, 4(3), 328-361.
Krefting, L. (1991). Rigor in Qualitative Research: The Assessment of Trustworthiness. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 45(3), 214-222.
Kremer, M. (2007). How Welfare States Care: Culture, Gender, and Parenting in Europe. The Netherlands: Amsterdam University Press.
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, J. (1992). Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes. Journal of European Social
Policy, 2(3), 159-173.
25 Lewis, J. (2009). Work-Family Balance, Gender and Policy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar
Publishing.
Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties. (2014, December 12). Zorg en
maatschappelijke ondersteuning. Tweede Kamer, vergaderjaar 2014-2015, 29 538, nr. 173. Den Haag.
Ministerie van Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid. (2016, December 16).Modernisering
regelingen voor verlof en arbeidstijden. Tweede Kamer, vergaderjaar 2016-2017, 32 855, nr. 33.
Morel, N., Palier, B., & Palme, J. (2012). Towards a Social Investment Welfare State? Ideas, Policies and Challenges. Policy Press.
Orloff, A. (1993). Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States. American Sociological Review, 58(3), 303-328. Padamsee, T. (2009). Culture in Connection: Re-Contextualizing Ideational Processes in the
Analysis of Policy Development. Social Politics, 16(4), 413-445.
Pavolini, E., & Ranci, C. (2008). Restructuring the welfare state: reforms in long-term care in Western European countries. Journal of European Social Policy, 18(3), 246-259.
Plantenga, J. (2002). Combining work and care in the polder model: an assessment of the Dutch part-time strategy. Critical Social Policy, 22(1), 53-71.
Saldaña, J. (2009). The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Saraceno, C. (2017). Family Relationships and Gender Equality in the Social Investment Discourse: A Too Reduced View? In Hemerijck, A. (Ed.), The Uses of Social Investment. Oxford University Press.
Schmidt, V., & Radaelli, C. (2004). Policy Change and Discourse in Europe: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. West European Politics, 27(2), 183-210.
Schmidt, V. (2008). Discursive Institutionalism: The Explanatory Power of Ideas and Discourse. Annual Review of Political Science, 11, 303-326.
Schreier, M. (2014). Qualitative Content Analysis. In Flick, U. (Ed.). The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis. London, UK: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Schut, F., & Van Den Berg, B. (2010). Sustainability of Comprehensive Universal Long-term Care Insurance in the Netherlands. Social Policy & Administration, 44(4), pp. 411-435. Stone, D. (2012). The Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision-Making (3rd ed.). New York: W.W.
