How the Home-Care-Benefit Became Prominent on the Agenda in Germany

1st Supervisor: Dr. Sonja Blum Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster Institut für Politikwissenschaft 2nd Supervisor: Dr. Minna van Gerven-Haanpaa Universiteit Twente Enschede School of Management and GovernanceBachelor Thesis: Bachelor Thesis: When an Idea’s Time Has Come – How the Home-Care-Benefit Became Prominent on the Agenda in Germany Susanne Heiland Double Diploma Program Warendorfer Straße 146 Public Administration/European Studies [email protected] 6th semester [email protected] s-Number: 365358/1247905 Table of Content 1. Introduction ................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background and Central Problem....................................................... 2 1.2 Research Question and Structure ........................................................ 4 2. Theoretical Conceptualization: Multiple Streams Framework .. 4 2.1 The Multiple Streams Framework in the Tradition of the ‘Garbage Can Model’ ................................................................................................. 4 2.2 Main Structural Elements ................................................................... 6 2.2.1 Problem Stream ................................................................................... 7 2.2.2 Policy Stream ...................................................................................... 8 2.2.3 Political Stream ................................................................................... 9 2.2.4 Window of Opportunity ..................................................................... 10 2.2.5 Policy Entrepreneur .......................................................................... 11 3. Methodological Considerations .................................................. 12 3.1 Research Strategy ............................................................................ 12 3.2 Structured Content Analysis............................................................. 13 3.2.1 Pre-specifying the Units of Analysis (Step 1) ..................................... 14 3.2.2 Constructing a Category System (Step 2, 3 & 4) ................................ 16 4. Case Study: What Made the Grand Coalition Attend to the Idea of a Home-Care-Benefit? ................................................................... 17 4.1 Re-directing German Family Policy: From the ‘Male Breadwinner Model’ towards the ‘Adult Worker Model’? .............................................. 17 4.2 Problem Stream ............................................................................... 21 4.2.1 What is Perceived as Compelling Problem? ...................................... 21 4.3 Policy Stream ................................................................................... 24 4.3.1 Which Ideas are Capturing the Attention of Policy Makers? .............. 24 4.4 Political Stream ................................................................................ 27 4.4.1 What is the Broad Range of Opinions on that Item?........................... 28 4.5 Coupling of the Streams: the Window of Opportunity and Policy Entrepreneurs ............................................................................................ 31 4.5.1 Did a Window of Opportunity Open?................................................. 32 4.5.2 Who Can Be Identified as Policy Entrepreneur? ................................ 32 5. Conclusion .................................................................................... 33 References ........................................................................................... 37 1. Introduction “It is no longer the endeavour of family policy to dictate people how to live, but rather to enable people to live how they want.” (BT-PlPr.17/178, 2012, p. 21095, translated by the author) With the quotation above, Kristina Schröder (CDU1), current federal minister for family affairs, defends the introduction of a home-care-benefit2 in a speech to the German Federal Parliament. As of January 2013 the benefit shall be provided for families who want to care for their children at home and opt against a place in a pub- licly financed day-care nursery. Initially the home-care-benefit was stipulated within the Kinderförderungsgesetz (KiföG, children advancement act) that became effective in December 2008. Back then it was pushed by its advocates as inextricably linked to the reform initiative of the former minister for family affairs, Ursula von der Leyen (CDU), to significantly expand childcare facilities for under-three-years old. The main argument put forth for the adoption of a home care benefit is the recognition of different family models and the facilitation of real ‘free choice’ for parents. Though the home-care-benefit ranks highly from the perspective of parental choice (Plantega & Remery, 2009), it has been controversially discussed back since 2007 and is until today. Proponents of the home-care-benefit are blamed being reactionary (Ostner, 2010), as “recent reforms triggered a departure from the established policy path, moving West Germany toward the adult worker model3, which had already been pre- dominant in East Germany” (Fleckenstein, 2011, pp. 546-547). The ambition of my thesis project is to detect the driving forces for the home-care- benefit to emerge on the political agenda and lead to an agreement in 2008. As I am interested in the causes that engendered this agenda, I take on a process-related perspective. The multiple streams framework (MSF) developed by Kingdon (1984) has proved to be very suitable for the analysis of the home-care-benefit, as the perspective adopted by the MSF assumes that policy-making cannot be accurately described as a rational decision-making process, but rather as the temporal simultaneity of different components which lead to agenda change (Kingdon, 2011). 1 CDU stands for Christlich Demokratische Union (Christian Democratic Union) 2 As there is no technical term for the German Betreuungsgeld, I determine to translate it that way. 3 In an ‘adult worker family model’ it is assumed that all adults are in the labour market, whereas in a ‘male breadwinner family model’ a gendered division of labour exists, with the men engaging in paid employment and women being expected to care for the children at home (Lewis, 2001). 1 1.1 Background and Central Problem At the backdrop of an increased influx of women into the labour market the Europe- an Commission early recognised the need to reconcile family obligations and paid work as one of the ‘new’ developments, that generate demands for states to take on new responsibilities (Commission of the Europen Communities, 1994). This notion is based on the observation that in a post-industrial society “it can no longer be assumed that care (…) will be provided as an unpaid labour of love by women within the private realm of the family” (Mahon, 2002, p. 345). However, the request of the EC in the early 1990s to provide formal care arrangements in order to facilitate the reconciliation of paid work and family obligations – particularly for women – was quite progressive with regard to the institutional setting of some European welfare regimes. This refers particularly to the Conservative welfare state4 in Continental Europe, where the traditional division of gender roles was at the heart of the Bismarckian welfare edifice and made the provision of childcare services obsolete; consequently, the defamilialization5 degree was very low. However, the norms and ideas underpin- ning the Bismarckian welfare state edifice were considerably challenged by the welfare state crisis, which emerged in the mid-1970s. The manifestations of high unem- ployment rates and the arise of atypical employment forms constituted for all Euro- pean welfare states, but particularly for the Bismarckian welfare regime, “a powerful and continuing source of pressure” (Pierson, 2001, p. 99) to reform their agenda in order to meet the ‘new risks groups’ that emerged with the shift from industrial to post-industrial economies and societies (Bonoli, 2006). As new social risks reforms are shaped extensively by the existing policy regimes (Palier & Martin, 2008), the Bismarckian welfare state was – in comparison to the Social Democratic- and Liberal welfare state clusters – the most challenged one by the new economic circumstances; but also the most rigid ones in terms of structural change (Aust & Bönker, 2004). However, as Taylor-Gooby (2004) argues, “new social risks policy is influenced, but not governed, by old risk regimes” (Taylor-Gooby, 4 The systematic comparison of welfare regimes was facilitated by Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990), who developed a threefold typology of welfare state clusters, embracing the Liberal-, Conservative- and Social Democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990). In his seminal work Esping-Andersen (1990) went beyond the prevalent approaches to compare welfare states on the basis of the aggregated social spending and asked particularly for what and why welfare states spend the money (Blum & Rille-Pfeiffer, 2010) . 5 De-familialization measures the extent to which family responsibilities are relaxed either by state or by market provisions (Esping-Andersen, 1999). An example for a defamilializing measure is e.g. affordable high quality child- and elderly care. 2 2004, p. 226). Accordingly, in the 1990s many Continental European countries began to perceive themselves as ‘sick’ economies (Palier, 2010, p. 342), and it became a widely shared diagnosis that the

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