In this session of the EUI Social Investment Working Group, Steven Ballantyne will present his findings on the late development of childcare in Ireland while Johannes Karremans will present his research on the role of electoral pressures in shaping social investment-oriented reforms.
The legacy of the Church and the failure of early childhood education and care in Ireland
Speaker: Steven Ballantyne (PhD Researcher, EUI)
Discussant: Manuel Alvariño (PhD Researcher, EUI)
Abstract:
While several European countries have invested to introduce and expand work-family policies including early childhood education and care, Ireland remains a laggard. In this article, I assess the historical effect of the dominant position of the Church in the delivery of welfare services on future developments in early childhood education and care. I find that the institutional legacy of the Church inhibited the development of public system. As a result, the community and voluntary sector entered to provide a limited number of services and later the private-for-profit sector emerged as the main provider. Once their roles as providers became established, the state was unable to effectively intervene in the system to improve availability, affordability and quality while ensuring that providers remained sustainable. In the 2000s, governments attempted to use cash transfer programmes with the nominal purpose to subsidise costs for families, but this and subsequent supply side programmes proved insufficient. Though government programmes have attempted to resolve the issues of availability, affordability, and quality, particularly since 2015, there remain significant deficiencies in the system. This article contributes to the literature on social investment recalibration in European welfare states and shows that timing and circumstance produce dynamics of sequencing and contingency which affect recalibration processes.
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Do social investment-oriented reforms need to be exposed to or sheltered from electoral pressures?
Speaker: Johannes Karremans (Postdoctoral Researcher, EUI)
Discussant: Reto Burgisser (Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Zurich)
Abstract:
Changing times require policy change. Economic change requires new modes of state intervention and creates new electoral demands to which political parties must be responsive. From a problem-solving perspective, policies of state intervention that optimise economic and social outcomes may require the sheltering from electoral dynamics in order to allow policymakers to design measures that are long-term rather than short-term oriented. By contrast, responsiveness to electoral demands requires that policy options are debated in the public arena and the decision-making process to be exposed to electoral scrutiny. Are social investment-oriented reforms the result of decision-making processes that are sheltered from or exposed to electoral dynamics? In existing research, the empirical evidence is mixed. On the one hand, social investment policies are found to be more advanced in countries featuring governance structures in which the clarity of responsibility for policymaking is blurred by coalition dynamics and social concertation. On the other hand, the variation in social investment among European countries is aligned with different degrees of success of pro and anti- social investment coalitions in getting access to government. This article theorizes three empirical implications for on the one hand explanations based on sheltering from and on the other explanations based on exposure to electoral pressures, and tests these implications for welfare reforms introduced in five continental European countries between 2002 and 2022. Overall, the article finds more evidence for the argument that social investment-oriented reform is facilitated more in contexts in which the decision-making process is sheltered from electoral pressures.
Hybrid event. The link to the session will be provided following registration.