Varieties of Policy Design in Swiss Family Policy Adaptation to New Social Demands: Bounded Possibilities of Childcare Services for Social- and Gender Equality

This paper deals with the question of who ends up with what in the process of welfare state adaptation to new social demands in post-industrial societies. To answer this question a new typology of childcare policies on the basis of the social outcomes of those policies in terms of redistribution and gender equality will be developed. The implications of childcare policies on these two dimensions of inequality are of particular interest, given that the internationally literature agrees since a long time that we need a new typology that helps to understand the trade-offs between distributive and socio-cultural goals. Empirically, I focus on the specific design of childcare policies that are institutionalised in ten Swiss municipalities since the 1990s. To this end, I first classify the different policy designs of childcare policies according to their degree of professionalization and the use of childcare services by parents. Second, I develop a new typology of childcare policies that allows to illustrate the potential implications of the design of such policies on gender equality and social redistribution. Whereas some municipalities have institutionalised public support for childcare services with low quality standards, which are provided by daily mothers, others have implemented highly professionalized crèches with rigorous quality standards. However, these offers are used differently by parents from different income classes. Whereas the low quality childcare services are used more frequently by parents from low income classes, the more professionalized offers are used more frequently by parents with middle and high income. This segregation in the use of services is notable, not only with regard to the criteria of social redistribution: It is even more striking in regard to the scientific social investment discourse, where it is stated that the reduction of poverty should be obtained by public investment in human capital, beginning with pre-school children.