The EUI Widening Europe Programme initiative, backed by contributions from the European Union and EUI Contracting States, is designed to strengthen internationalisation, competitiveness, and quality in research in the so-called Widening countries, and thus foster a more cohesive European Higher Education and Research area.
This project has been funded via the EUI Early Stage Researchers (ESR) call 2024 with the contribution of the Widening Europe Programme.
Family policy, constituting an important part of the welfare state, has been applied by governments to reach a variety of political goals ranging from increasing fertility, through promoting gender equality to reducing poverty. While earlier research in family policy has made significant advances in the analysis of major policies such as family benefits, parental leave and childcare, and integrated family policy in welfare regime typologies, little attention has been dedicated to housing-related policies supporting families with children.
The aim of the research project “Housing Families” is to explore the relatively under-researched terrain of housing assistance for families with children by focusing on two issues. On the one hand, a database of housing-related policies targeting families with children adopted since the beginning of the 20th century will be created allowing for the comparative analysis of their design. On the other hand, the long-term development of policies will be examined as reflecting wider socio-political changes in the different case studies such as demographic trends, the dominance of conservative political parties championing pronatalist policies, housing market cycles, and specific regional or domestic political developments.