How Political Demands Around Care Needs Are Recognised By the Welfare States: Cash-for-Care Schemes, Disability and Feminist Movements across Countries

Conventional wisdoms around the effects of social movements on social change at the state level have largely focused on immediate and direct outcomes, such as adopting legislation; however, how political demands of social movement organisations are acknowledged by the state varies, especially when there exist conflicts between differential political discourses in a single policy. This paper thusly examines political demands around care needs wherein feminist movements advocating the rights of care givers and disability movements demanding care recipients’ independent living and discretion actively intersect.

Nancy Fraser distinguishes two directions from which needs get politicised in the welfare states – oppositional needs-talk from below and expert discourses from above. In developing this theoretical discussion on the ‘politics of need interpretation’, this study explores how political demands around care needs are differently transformed into policies at the state level and why it varies across countries. It would contribute to existing social movement literature by expanding the role of political frames not only mobilising resources and constructing collective identities but also policy change at the state level.

The article considers 13 OECD countries (Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and United Kingdom) to examine Cash-for-Care Schemes, defined as publicly funded cash transfers directly given to elderly individuals and/or disabled people instead of benefits in kind so that they can choose the way of addressing their own care needs. This paper adopts a discourse network analysis to investigate political frames at the state level and within disability and feminist movement organisations respectively by utilising novel dataset. The dataset includes policy documents, grey/academic literature, party manifestos, disability and feminist movement organisations’ statements. The results show under what conditions political demands from both social movements are recognised as intended at the stage of policy design.