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The relevance of family for social rights in international comparison: between family allowances and claimed family solidarity

Subject Area Empirical Social Research
Term from 2020 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 438088800
 
Final Report Year 2024

Final Report Abstract

Understanding societal redistribution has been a core concern of social sciences since their very beginning. And indeed, many facets, differences and dynamics of this redistribution are understood by now thanks to early and recent analyses of very different kinds. For instance, we know quite a lot about welfare state redistribution in terms of different social groups, such as redistribution between the rich and the poor, or the currently working and nonworking populations. One core factor in welfare state redistribution, though, has been widely neglected: the family. This is striking since family significantly influences the degree of redistribution, being a crucial principle of welfare state redistribution in addition to others. Addressing it systematically may challenge our understanding of welfare states and their variations, often captured as 'welfare regimes'. This project has delivered insights into three fundamental facets of welfare state redistribution: (1) as a principle, that is (2) concretised in what we call specific 'redistributive logics', and (3), put into practice by means of its implementation. Applying these facets to family is based on general knowledge of welfare state design and variety. Accordingly, one might first expect the degree to which family is relevant in welfare state redistribution to differ between welfare states, as indeed it does. We have shown, though, that family is a significant redistributive principle in all European welfare states, and calculated the degrees of international variation. Second, one might expect country variation in how different family forms are addressed by redistribution, such that redistribution results more advantageously for some family forms than for others. Here we have identified various redistributive logics, their international commonalities and variation. And third, being aware of the challenges of implementing redistributive regulations, one can expect that redistribution as formally regulated might differ from its outcomes, such that redistributive differences, as found in welfare state regulations, might be increased or decreased by actual implementation. We calculated these deviations and looked for international variation also here. The latter facet faced the question of which data to use to describe welfare state differences and identify regime types. The outcomes of this project contribute to illuminating the empirical, theoretical and methodological complexity of comparative welfare state analysis and, in part, family research. Ultimately it allows a better understanding of welfare state redistribution, the position of family in it, and the discrepancies between democratically decided forms of redistribution and their implementation.

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