Comparing the Inclusiveness of Social Policy in-Kind Benefits: Using the Family Model Method across Six Cases.

Achieving a comprehensive, comparative cross-national understanding of the inclusiveness of social policies aimed at addressing social inequalities has proven notoriously difficult. These difficulties stem from both conceptual and methodological challenges. While there is broad agreement that more universal policies—those with fewer eligibility criteria—tend to be more inclusive, there is no consensus on the definition of social policy inclusiveness. Further, although prior research has successfully compared the inclusiveness of cash benefits across countries by calculating net disposable income (e.g., Van Havere et al. 2024), the cross-sectional analysis of in-kind benefits has proven much more challenging. We argue that the family model method is a valuable tool for comparing and measuring the inclusiveness of social services, as it provides a standardised unit of analysis that allows for clear identification of both cross-national and within-national differences in the inclusiveness of in-kind benefits. We create various family types, differing in key aspects such as the number and age of children, employment status, number of earners, administrative status, and the incidence of disability, to address the common question in social policies: ‘who gets what?’. More specifically, this article compares how the right to access childcare benefits changes in Belgium, Croatia, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the UK when contrasting the ‘traditional’ nuclear dual-earner cohabiting family with two children to other family types, such as families with migratory status or single-parent households. We anticipate that our contribution will pave the way for future researchers to explore comparative aspects of a range of social policies using this tool. However, we acknowledge the limitations of our study, as this is an exploratory experiment aimed at identifying the usefulness of the family model method for comparing the inclusiveness of childcare and services across EU nations when adjusting for different family types, rather than contributing new empirical knowledge.