Ideas and Normative Institutionalization: Explaining the Paradoxes of French Family and Employment Policy
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Ideas and Normative Institutionalization: Explaining the Paradoxes of French Family and Employment Policy Linda A. White Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3G3. E-mail: [email protected]
A burgeoning literature on the French welfare state notes a puzzle: successive French governments in the 20th century developed a number of employmentfriendly family policies in an otherwise conservative welfare state. Although research to date has tapped into part of the explanatory puzzle, a fuller explanation is needed of the drivers of French welfare state development. This article focuses on the role of ideas and norms to account for both the breadth and narrowness of French family policy. The article demonstrates that acceptance of the norm of ‘reconciliation of work and family life’ shaped and transformed actors’ interests and provided the foundation upon which gender-progressive employment-based family policies emerged, not because actors accepted the need to promote women’s equality but rather because they agreed that mothers should be assisted in their childrearing role through workplace policies such as paid maternity leave and child care programs. However, the gendered nature of the reconciliation norm can also account for the constraints on and current shifts in contemporary work and family policy. French Politics (2004) 2, 247–271. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200061 Keywords: child care; employment and family policy; France; ideas; norms; reconciliation
Ideas and Normative Institutionalization: Explaining the Paradoxes of French Family and Employment Policy France’s welfare state is a curious and perhaps unique exemplar of the relationship between the state, market, and the family.1 Governments have put in place a number of policies and programs, such as a comprehensive child care and early childhood education system and maternity/parental leave programs that allow women to participate more easily in the labor market.2 French social and family policy does not reinforce the idea of a ‘male breadwinner’ as many other European welfare states such as England, the Netherlands, and Germany do (Langan and Ostner, 1991; Lewis, 1992; Sainsbury, 1996); instead, a range
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of family policies and programs support women’s labor market participation either by design or effect. The breadth and depth of these employmentsupporting family policies distinguishes France from the less generous liberal welfare states, as well as from most of its conservative corporatist comparators, who tend to provide relatively generous employment-related benefits to workers but expect, under a principle of subsidiarity, the church, the family, or voluntary organizations to support families (Esping-Andersen, 1990; van Kersbergen, 1995). Why would French governments take such a distinctively gender egalitarian path, more along the lines of social democratic Sweden or Denmark, especially when social democratic
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