Christina Bergqvist, Uppsala University

2009-2015

In the project Who cares? A comparative study of the influence of policies and culture on the decision making in the family the aim has been to understand how institutions (policies) and culture interact in the decisions parents make about who should care for small children, how parents should share in the care of children and when children should start daycare/pre-school. We have compared the interrelationship between policies, norms and practices in two very different cultural and institutional contexts, the Czech and the Slovak Republics and Norway and Sweden. Norway and Sweden as well as Slovakia and the Czech Republic have during the past been united into one nation and thus have many historical and cultural similarities. At the same time, they also have some cultural differences, such as the fact that Norway and Slovakia are said to be more religious, while Sweden and the Czech Republic are more secular. Thus, both pair of countries are more similar culturally than most countries, yet also display some differences, which make it easier to investigate which types of cultural differences might influence the manner in which families decide to utilize state family policies (such as parental leaves, choosing various types of publicly supported childcare, etc.). In addition, despite some differences both pairs of countries have rather similar family policies, which makes it even easier to investigate how some cultural differences could influence the decisions of families to utilize state policies.
The aim of the project has thus been to improve our knowledge about what influences the decisions about who should care for children as these decisions have implications for gender equality in the family as well as in the labour market. More specifically we have been looking at the micro-level by interviewing families to see how they reason behind their choices of different types of family policies. This way we have learned more about the relative importance of cultural values and institutions for the actual decisions they make and cross-national differences also become more apparent. By focusing on the decision-making process among citizens rather than policy makers, our study brings in an often neglected perspective to the debate on institutions.

Most important results

We have conducted 100 interviews with parents in the capitals of Sweden, Norway, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The questions were designed to understand how they ideally would like to do and what they actually had to consider when they decided about parental leave, different forms of childcare and work. Our results show that little difference exists between the interviewed Czechs and Slovaks, but some interesting differences between Swedes and Norwegians. In the article The state as a norm-builder? The interplay between family policies and cultural values in Norway and Sweden we find that more or less all the interviewed parents in both countries say that their ideal is that parents should share the parental leave. For different reasons this had not been possible in reality and in most cases mothers took much longer leaves than fathers. However, the Swedish fathers are much more likely than Norwegian fathers to go on parental leave for a longer period than the quota period. At the same time fathers in Sweden are more likely than in Norway to spread their quota period over a long period. In explaining these differences, we show that the state provides incentives in more ways than purely economic ones: it also establishes norms, thus making the interplay between institutions and culture rather complicated. More specifically, fathers in Sweden are much more likely to go on leave for longer periods than the quota period than in Norway, because the Swedish state gives moral incentives rather than economic incentives to do so. Fathers in Sweden officially have half the leave time and if they decide not to use more than the ear-marked two months, they must sign a paper officially transferring their time to the mother. This provides a moral signal that the state expects fathers to share equally even if it does not give them an economic incentive to do so. Meanwhile, the fact that Swedish fathers are much more likely to spread their leave time over several years than Norwegian fathers shows the influence of institutions: i.e. the fact that in Sweden parents can spread their leave time during eight years compared to three years in Norway. In addition, we also show that the cultural norm of how long mothers should breast-feed greatly influences parental caring decisions even in those cases with parents sharing the leaves rather equally.

Not surprisingly there are great differences between the post-communist countries and the Nordic countries (Saxonberg 2013). For example, we find that Czechs and Slovaks seem to take the current policies allowing mothers' to take long maternal leave, often three years, as "natural". Most of them thought it would be bad for children to attend childcare at earlier ages. This indicates that institutions can influence norms. Only a few parents in these countries expressed the ideal of sharing parental leave. Here it seems clear though that policies can matter, as some fathers claimed that they would have stayed at home if they would have received 100% of their income for a period, but in these cases they also see this possibility as being contingent on whether their wives would "let them." Institutions develop in a manner that they are often norm-setting, so if they are designed to encourage mothers to stay at home and if they are designed to have children start attending daycare at the age of three, then parents often accept this arrangement as being "natural." Some parents claimed that if they did not have parental leave benefits, then they would not have been able to afford to have the mother stay at home for such long periods and the mother would have returned to work earlier. Meanwhile, as already noted, some fathers claimed that they would have stayed at home for some period with their children if they could receive a high level of benefits, as long as the mother agreed to this. They still took it for granted, however, that the mother is the main carer (Saxonberg 2012).

In the project only parents from the capital cities were interviewed. Based on the results from this study it would be interesting to do a similar study in rural areas. It would also be of theoretical interest to further explore the differences we found between Norway and Sweden in the dynamic between policies and cultural values.

In the project Steven Saxonberg, Masaryk University, Brno, Dept of Social Policy and Social Work also participated. Steven Saxonberg had the main responsibility for the interviews in The Czech Repulic and Slovakia and Christina Bergqvist for Norway and Sweden. Papers from the project have been presented in several international conferences and articles have been sent to international journals for review.

Publications

Publications and papers related to the project

Bergqvist, Christina and Steven Saxonberg. 2013. “Nursing mothers and ”Latte pappas” on parental leave. The interplay between family policies and cultural values in Norway and Sweden. Paper presented at RC 19, Budapest 22 – 24 July, 2013.

Bergqvist, Christina and Steven Saxonberg.  2015. “The state as a norm-builder?  The interplay between family policies and cultural values in Norway and Sweden” (submitted to Journal of Social Policy).

Bergqvist, Christina. “The Welfare State and Gender Equality” The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics, Oxford University Press, 2015. Forthcoming.

Bergqvist, Christina, Rianne Mahon, Anneli Anttonen, Deborah Brennan & Barbara Hobson “Convergent care regimes? Childcare arrangements in Australia, Canada, Finland and Sweden”, in Journal of European Social Policy. 2012. No 4. Vol 22.

Saxonberg, Steven. 2012. “The Influence of Policies and Cultural Beliefs on Carrying Arrangements: A Micro-Level Analysis of the Czech and Slovak Republics.” Presented at the ESPANet conference in Edinburgh on 6-8 September 2012.

Saxonberg, Steven. “A Tale of Four Cities: The Influence of Culture and Institutions on Parental Choice for Childcaring in Bratislava, Prague, Oslo and Stockholm,” presented at the European Sociology Association conference in Turin on August 30, 2013.

Saxonberg, Steven, Tomas Sirovatka and Miroslava Janoušková. 2013. “When do Policies become Path Dependent? The Czech Example.” Journal of European Social Policy. 2013, vol. 23, no. 4.
 
Saxonberg, Steven and Tomas Sirovatka. 2014. “From A Garbage Can to a Compost Model of Decision-Making? Social Policy Reform and The Czech Government’s Reaction to the International Financial Crisis.” (Forthcoming in Social Policy and Administration.)

Saxonberg, Steven. 2014. Gendering Family Policies in Post-Communist Europe: A Historical-Institutional Analysis (Palgrave).