Cash-for-childcare-schemes: How do they fit to their institutional and social environment?

The aim of the dissertation project is to investigate how the cash-for-childcare (CFC) benefit is coordinated with other policies, which affect the distribution of paid work and care in the family. Thereby, policy goals as well as the institutional design of policies will be considered. Furthermore, it will be examined how the CFC benefit fits to the social environment, i.e. social practices and normative orientations concerning the distribution of paid work and care in the family. According to recent emp irical studies, including the social environment into the analysis is crucial, because successful policy-making does not only depend on coordination between policies: Moreover, it has to take normative orientations in society into account. The cases unde r study are Sweden, Norway and Germany. The three countries are selected due to their different forms of support for the dual-earner/dual-carer- and the male-breadwinner-model. To investigate coordination deficits between the CFC benefit and other polici es that affect the distribution of paid work and care in the family, the institutional design of these policies will be studied in detail. Furthermore, political paradigms will be analyzed to investigate how policy goals are coordinated. Social practices and normative orientations will be explored by ordinal regression analyses of surveys that were carried out short before the introduction of the CFC schemes. Thereby, it is possible to discover how the social background of the reform looked like. To ident ify coordination deficits between the policy-regime and the social environment, it will be examined, if the paradigms and the institutional framework of CFC schemes are in line with social practices and normative orientations of parents.