Tomasz Inglot – Christina Rat – Dorottya Szikra:
Welfare states and families in a transforming Europe since 1945
A comparison of Hungary, Poland, and Romania
Academic symposium

Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences, HAS, Hegedüs room, Budapest I. Úri u. 49.

9 April, 2015 (Thursday), 1p.m.

Invitation and details

Abstract

Our book aims to explain ideas, institutional dynamics, and politics behind the significant policy shift or a sudden surge of attention to benefits and services for working women, families,
and children across Europe. We illustrate this in a historical comparative analysis of three countries in Central and Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary, and Romania that adhered to a common European sequence of adoption of the most important family policy programs. Our main goal is to explain an apparent contradiction between the persistent variation across distinct national family policy programs and the converging tendencies that are now increasingly apparent in a growing number of European welfare states in general (Kuhnle 2000) and more specifically within domestic family policy domains (Matzke and Ostner 2011, Fleckenstein & Seelib-Kaiser 2011). In other words, we ask: How do we account for the seemingly contradictory, simultaneous path-dependence and path-shifting in many areas of family policy such as family allowances, parental leave benefits, childcare services, tax incentives or child anti-poverty measures?