The Policies and Politics of Care and Work-Family Relations In the World

Across the world, care arrangements are under growing strain. As economic pressures push more households, especially in the Global South, to intensify their engagement in paid labor, families face mounting difficulties in reconciling employment, care, and social reproduction. Declining fertility rates across Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa further reveal the depth of contemporary care crises. Recent scholarship shows that these crises take different forms across regions, shaped by labor market structures, demographic change, welfare institutions, and gender norms. Yet we still know too little about the politics through which states recognize, contest, and respond to these pressures.

This session invites papers examining the policies and politics of care and work-family relations across world regions. We are particularly interested in how political regimes, party competition, institutional frameworks, organized interests, policy legacies, and the timing and intensity of crises shape political discourses around care, family, and work. We also welcome contributions that analyze how these political dynamics translate into social policies concerning childcare, parental leave, long-term care, cash transfers, labor regulation, and broader work-family arrangements. The session is open to interdisciplinary contributions from sociology, political science, development economics, demography, gender studies, and comparative welfare research. We welcome diverse methodological approaches, including large-N and small-N comparison, case studies, process tracing, text analysis, quantitative analysis, and mixed methods. The aim is to deepen our understanding of how states respond to care crises and how these responses reshape work, family, and inequality. This session will be organized as an invited session.

Session Organizer:

Keonhi Son KEONHI SON, University of Mannheim, Germany, son@uni-mannheim.de

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