Demographic challenges of Europe in the new millennium: Swedish family policies as an answer to them?

Abstract

Welfare states have changed greatly in the past few decades, manifested in retrenchment, deregulations and reduced state engagement in traditional social protection, unlike the Golden Age of Welfare in the mid 1940s to mid 1970s (Palier 2010; Wincott 2013). Back then, based on the dominant family structure of the mid twentieth century, social policies targeted the male breadwinner with an industrial job. Indeed, the rationale of the post-war welfare state was to protect men as providers, and thus their families, against the risk of welfare losses when not being able to work for pay due to illness, unemployment or old age. Women could uphold a decent living standard in the face of these old social risks via stable marriage (and upon widowhood) as they were expected to ‘de-commodify’; that is, to give up work when entering marriage or having the first child (Bonoli 2007; Orloff 1993). The implicit gender contracts of the ‘housewife era’ relegated women to unpaid work in the family, and made their welfare, social and economic status dependent on that of their husbands (Pateman 1988). From the 1970s onwards, however, post-industrial transformations have increasingly come to characterise advanced societies. Deindustrialisation and tertiarisation of employment resulted in changing labour markets attracting large masses of women into the labour force. These developments coincided with increasing destandardisation of employment, career interruptions and deregularisation of full-time and standard work contracts, creating new social and economic risks for families (Bonoli 2007; Charles 2005). The Nordic and the English-speaking countries were among the first to enter the post-industrial stage of economic development. Continental and Southern European societies followed this path with a delay of two to three decades. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Central-Eastern Europe, including the Baltic countries, were to handle