Politics of defamilialization: A comparison of Italy,Japan,Korea and Spain

Abstract

This article investigates the politics of ‘defamilialization of care’ in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By ‘defamilialization of care’, we refer to those public policies, which aim at reducing the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and the old. We build upon the existing literature on new social risks by highlighting the role of those macro-political institutions such as electoral systems and government types in order to demonstrate that there are two very different types of politics of defamilialization: (1) election-oriented and (2) problem-oriented. We attribute different policy outcomes in the four familialist countries to their specific institutional configurations rather than to partisan government composition or different cultural orientations.

Keywords

Childcare elderly care familialism gender Italy Japan Korea new social risks Spain welfare

Introduction

This article investigates the politics of the ‘defamilialization of care’ in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By ‘defamilialization of care’, we refer to those public policies that aim to reduce the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and for the old. For our purpose, we consider policy decisions which are equally defamilializing whether they provide care services publicly or publicly subsidize market-based provision of care services. Childcare and long-term care (LTC hereafter) for frail elderly have been two important areas of recent welfare state expansions related to new social risks (NSR hereafter). The existing European scholarship on NSR notes important transformations that have occurred in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands but downplays the changes in Southern Europe and rarely refers to East Asia (Bonoli, 2013; Da Roit and Sabatinelli, 2013; Knijn and Saraceno, 2010; León and Pavolini, 2014; Morgan, 2013; Palier and Martin, 2007).

Our four-country comparison enables us to identify previously overlooked policy variations and to put forth a new causal argument to explain them. Despite the fact that the four countries are familialist, there have been more dramatic policy changes in Korea and Spain than in Italy and Japan. What factors enabled such big shifts in Korea and Spain? Does the absence of such factors explain why policy changes were slower in Italy and Japan? Japan provides a further puzzle. While it lagged behind other countries in childcare expansion, it successfully implemented a big policy shift in LTC. In contrast, Italy had seen very little policy change in either childcare or LTC. In sum, we want to understand what conditions promote the defamilialization of care in countries with very strong familialism. This is an important question because understanding how care regimes change has an important impact on gender relations; change is of crucial importance from a feminist perspective (Daly and Lewis, 2000; Knijn and Ungerson, 1997; Michel and Mahon, eds., 2002; Orloff, 1993).

We build upon the existing literature on NSR by developing a more nuanced institutional argument. We explain how specific combinations of past social policies and political institutions give rise to two very different types of politics – ‘election-oriented’ and ‘problem-oriented’. We demonstrate how electoral competition in Korea and Spain promoted policy competition, while the concentration of agenda setting power enabled ‘the winner’ to implement new policies. We attribute policy shifts in Korea and Spain in terms of ‘election-oriented’ policy competition. By the same token, we explain how such ‘election-oriented’ policy shifts did not occur in Italy and Japan, where the institutional preconditions for majoritarian politics were absent. Japan, however, managed to implement a major LTC reform through ‘problem-oriented’ politics. The specific designs of the pre-existing social policies turned the shortage of formal elderly care services into a severe policy issue in Japan, while Italy’s pre-existing policies and the availability of cheap migrant care workers had the opposite effect. The formal policy consultation process in Japan, which included all the stakeholders, facilitated a ‘quiet’ but lengthy process of negotiations that led to a big ‘problem-oriented’ policy shift in LTC.

The rest of the article proceeds in four sections. The section ‘Defamilialization of care in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain’ documents the cross-national variations in childcare and LTC for the elderly in the four countries under review. The section after that discusses and evaluates the relevant literatures. The section ‘An alternative argument: embedding party competition in an institutional context’ presents our causal argument and the section ‘Evidence from process tracing’ applies it to the four-country cases. The final section briefly concludes.

Defamilialization of care in Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain

The four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – have gone through phases of ‘defamilialization’ at different times and to varying degrees (see Saraceno’s article in this issue). Figures 1 and 2 visualize the recent policy developments in formal childcare for 0- to 2-year-olds and LTC, respectively, by situating all four countries in a comparative perspective. As Figure 1 shows, during the 2000s, Korea has dramatically increased its formal childcare enrolment rates for infants in absolute terms – well over the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average. Although Spain lags behind Korea in absolute levels, the relative change in Spain has been significant: the enrolment rates in Korea during the period covered here expanded nearly 300 percent, while the rates in Spain expanded slightly less than 400 percent. In contrast, the changes have been more limited in Italy and Japan. Japan has been the most stagnant country in this respect, despite numerous government plans to increase the enrolment rate. Interestingly, Italy experienced expansion between 2003 and 2007, but its expansion was very modest in absolute terms (León and Pavolini, 2014; Sabatinelli, 2010). It is worth noting that the childcare enrolment rates in Italy and Japan for 0- to 2-year-olds are more favourable than those in Germany, which so many scholars consider as a successful case of the ‘Swedish turn’ in its work–family reconciliation policies.

Figure 1.

Enrolment rate of under-threes in formal childcare.

Figure 2.

LTC coverage rate of population aged over 65 years, early 2000 to 2012.

Figure 2 shows how coverage has increased in the LTC services since the early 2000s. Because of our interest in defamilialization, we look at services-in-kind and not at cash allowances, which can be used to reward family caregivers (see Saraceno, in this issue). Japan introduced a new social insurance scheme for LTC in 2000 and today provides coverage rates well above the OECD average, while Italy, Korea and Spain fall below (Campbell and Ikegami, 2000; Peng, 2002). The cut-off year of the early 2000s in Figure 2 results in an underestimation of coverage growth in Japan because the coverage rates for home help were well below 1 percent before the introduction of the LTC insurance.¹ Hence, the coverage rates in Japan grew more than 10 times. Korea also introduced a new LTC insurance (Choi, 2014; Estévez-Abe and Kim, 2014; Lee and Cho, 2012). Although its coverage rates are not high in absolute terms, they increased 20 times during the 2000s. Italy and Spain, in contrast, show modest increases during the same period. It is important to note here that, unlike Italy, Spain actually made a bold policy shift by introducing tax-financed universal access to LTC care (la Ley de Dependencia in 2006). However, the financial crisis that followed immediately delayed its full implementation, dramatically reducing the intended effect of the law (León and Pavolini, 2014; Naldini and Jurado, 2013).² Table 1 summarizes the cross-national variations discussed so far.

Table 1.

A comparative view of changes in elderly care (LTC) and childcare policy in Italy, Korea, Japan and Spain, 2000–2013.

	Major policy shifts in childcare	Trend in childcare coverage	Major policy shifts in LTC	Trend in elderly care services coverage
Italy	No	An expansion between 2003 and 2007, but then no change	No	Minor increase
Korea	Universal free access to childcare place 2012 (for 0- to 2-year-olds) 2013 (for 0- to 5-year-olds)	A threefold increase Above the OECD average	LTC insurance was decided in 2003 and implemented in 2008	A 20-fold increase (while absolute levels still low)
Japan	No	Very modest increase throughout the period	LTC insurance was legislated in 1997 and implemented in 2000	A 10-fold increase Above the OECD average
Spain	2008 (Plan Education 3)	A fourfold increase	Universal access to elderly care (La Ley de Dependencia in 2006)	Minor increase

Source: Authors’ own elaboration. See main text for relevant references.

LTC: long-term care; OECD: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Beyond existing theories: unresolved puzzles

It is important to state outright that most studies of care do not necessarily frame the issue as ‘politics of defamilialization’. Childcare has been treated as a subset of family–work reconciliation policies that include paid leaves for parents, although not all such policies promote defamilialization (Saraceno and Keck, 2010). Very few have concurrently studied the politics of childcare and LTC together (see Schoppa, 2008 for an important exception). Below, we have summarized existing causal arguments about expansions in childcare and LTC into three camps.

The magnitude of policy pressures

The literature on LTC tends to emphasize the magnitude of policy pressures as the main reason for policy shifts (Campbell et al., 2010; Pavolini and Ranci, 2008, 2013; Theobald and Hempel, 2013). Many governments face immense pressures as the number of frail elderly people increased as a result of improvements in longevity. This emphasis on policy pressures is also seen in the literature on welfare reforms (Häusermann, 2010, for instance). If the magnitude of policy pressures were the main causal factor, we would expect more significant reforms and care service expansion in Italy and Japan, which face the most acute demographic problems. In Japan 25 percent of its population were 65 years or older in 2013, followed by Italy’s 20.9 percent, Spain’s 17.9 percent and Korea’s 12.2 percent (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2011, online statistics, www.oecd.org). However, while Japan dramatically reformed its LTC policies, Italy did not. Neither did these two countries expand childcare in a significant way. In contrast, the biggest change occurred in a demographically much younger Korea.

Of course, demographic ageing is not the only factor that matters. We thus pay close attention to the programmatic differences in the pre-existing policies across our four cases. While they all shared strong familialism – meagre care services by the welfare state – the pre-existing policies for frail elderly care were far from being identical in our country cases. As we will demonstrate, some programmatic designs of pre-existing social policies exacerbate cost pressures related to demographic ageing – as in Japan – while other designs dampened them – as in Italy. Once we take past policies into consideration, we can see that ‘the magnitude of policy pressures’ is indeed an important causal factor in explaining Italy’s inaction in LTC reforms. That said, however, the past policies do not explain cross-national differences in childcare (ages 0–2 years) since they were more similar across cases. As Ferrera (2005) notes, policy problems do not automatically mean that solutions will be enacted, and many scholars have explored different political mechanisms.

Female voters’ attitudinal shifts and party competition

In contrast to the literature on LTC care, most work on recent expansions in childcare and family–work reconciliation policies pay close attention to the interaction between party competition and the growing political importance of women in politics (Bonoli and Reber, 2010; Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; Morgan, 2013). However, authors vary in the causal emphasis given to the political role of women versus party competition. Bonoli and Reber (2010) link the presence of women in the parliament with specific policy outcomes but fail to explain why. Other scholars emphasize the causal importance of party competition to respond to female voters’ attitudinal shifts (Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2015; Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; Morgan, 2013). Similarly, Häusermann (2006, 2010) suggests that interest and values might play out differently in reforms of ‘old social risk’ programmes and for the introduction of ‘new social risk’ programmes.

This literature assumes that increases in female education and employment rates, and female political representation cause female attitudinal shifts. Japan and Korea perform worst in every measure of gender equality – in education, employment, wages, gaps and political representation – among OECD countries (Estévez-Abe, 2013; Ikemoto and Han, 2014). Thus, we would therefore expect care service expansions to be smallest in Japan and Korea. However, on the contrary, Korea has expanded childcare services the most out of the four countries.

Figure 3 shows cross-national variations in the percentage of women who strongly agree that maternal work is harmful to preschool children. Unfortunately, Figure 3 only captures two time points with 20 years in between because the question was only asked in two waves in Korea. However, we use it here because it is the variable used by Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser (2015), who argue that it has a strong effect on expansion of family–work reconciliation policies. The cross-national variations in attitudes do not explain why Korea has expanded care services so much more dramatically than the other three countries. Later in the article, we will use a different but similar variable, for which multi-year data are available, in order to show that a cultural shift in Korea did not precede policy changes.

Figure 3.

The percentage of women in selected OECD countries who strongly agree that preschool children suffer when mothers work for pay.

Economic concerns/strategies as drivers of policy shifts

A number of scholars attribute the expansion of LTC and childcare to the shifts in the national economic and employment strategies. As Morel (2007) argues, ‘care policy reforms have been very closely linked to specific employment strategies’ (see also Bonoli, 2005: 441). By employment strategies, she is specifically referring to the need in Bismarckian welfare states – Belgium, France, Germany and the Netherlands – to create jobs and labour market flexibility. She thinks that this strategy results in a mixed strategy of public provision and publicly subsidized private provision of care in Europe. Research by others corroborates this view. Case studies show how employers welcome mixed strategies and the economic rationale used to justify service expansion (see Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; Leitner, 2010; Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011, Theobald and Hempel, 2013).

Of the three groups of causal arguments considered here, the economic strategy thesis is the only one that does not contradict the cross-national patterns we seek to explain. The Japanese and Korean LTC insurance schemes as well as Korean childcare expansion all adopted the mixed strategy of public and publicly subsidized private provision of services. In both countries, the defamilialization of care was perceived as a good strategy for creating new jobs (Campbell and Ikegami, 2000; Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; Lee and Cho, 2012; Yang, 2015). In Spain, too, the LTC reform was explicitly framed as something that would create jobs (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013). However, we are still left with two questions: Why didn’t Italy adopt the same economic strategy, which was so successful in the other three countries? Why, in Japan, did the economic strategy, which led to a dramatic policy shift in LTC, not work in childcare?

These three groups of causal arguments all capture some aspects of the political dynamics of ‘defamilialization of care’. However, each, on its own, fails to account for the variations we are seeking to explain here (see Table 1). While providing helpful insights, they leave too many questions unanswered. We call for a new approach that embeds party competition in a macro-institutional context.

An alternative argument: embedding party competition in an institutional context

We claim that there exists more than one type of ‘politics of defamilialization of care’. We identify two sets of politics, and call them ‘election-oriented’ politics and ‘problem-oriented’ politics. The former is more top-down and consists of a highly ‘visible’ competition among political parties, while the latter is more bottom-up and entails more ‘quiet’ negotiations among stakeholders and the government. We argue that defamilializing reforms occurred as ‘election-oriented’ policy shifts in Korea and Spain, where political parties competed to win voters’ support. In Italy and Japan, where the institutional preconditions were absent, no ‘election-oriented’ policy shifts took place. Japan, however, had the preconditions that enabled a major ‘problem-oriented’ policy shift in the LTC arena. This section discusses institutional preconditions for these two types of policy shifts.

Majoritarian politics and ‘election-oriented’ policy shifts

We argue that even when political leaders face similar socio-economic conditions – such as increases in women’s education and labour force participation rates, and demographic ageing – their responsiveness will differ depending on macro-political institutions surrounding them. By ‘“election-oriented” policy shifts’, we mean more politicized policy shifts that occur when political leaders take up a particular issue to mobilize voters and follow through their electoral promises once they seize power. This type of politics is most likely to occur when (1) electoral results determine which party forms the new government, (2) the winning party is capable of legislating its electoral promises, and (3) there is a credible threat that the opposition party might win the election. These conditions, in turn, are most likely to be met when a country has (1) majoritarian electoral rules, (2) the political party system is not too fragmented, (3) the agenda setting power is centralized in the hands of the Prime Minister (his or her Cabinet) or President in the case of a presidential system, (4) the government is stable and (5) single party majority governments rule.

The combination of plurality rule with single member districts (that is, first-past-the-post systems) are known to produce majoritarian parliaments, whereby two parties compete over power.³ However, proportional representation rules can favour large parties when district magnitude is sufficiently small as used to be the case in Spain until voters turned against the two biggest establishment parties (Hopkin, 2005). When the party system is not very fragmented, electoral competition comes down to a race between the two largest parties. In a parliamentary system, this gives voters a clear choice of next government. This institutional context motivates the two largest parties to make specific policy promises and to follow up on them when they become the ruling party. The failure to deliver promises carries a risk of punishment in the next round of national elections especially when a credible opposition party exists.

For the winner to be able to follow through with the promises, it is important that the party leader controls the policy agenda. The three factors listed above as (3), (4) and (5) are of critical importance. Even when the Prime Minister or President holds the de jure agenda setting power, if the government duration is uncertain, we can expect his or her de facto agenda setting power to be limited. It is thus important that government is stable in between national elections in order to honour the link between the winner’s electoral mandate and the policy outcome. The government type is also important. When a prime minister presides over a single majority government, ceteris paribus, his or her policy capacity is greater than under a single minority or coalition government (Budge and Laver, 1992; Debus, 2008; Müller and Meyer, 2010). When the odds of forming a single majority government are good, party leaders’ calculation of pay-off from a successful electoral bid gets bigger leading to stronger desire to win the election.

In short, we think that political leaders in such systems are more incentivized to bring up new policy issues and also are better capable of implementing them when they win the election. The upshot of our argument is that these systems are more suited to producing big policy shifts. Let us now show how Korea and Spain fit the bill, while Italy and Japan do not.

Korea and Spain have experienced more decisive and stable alternations of power. A party, once in power, enjoys longer periods of uninterrupted rule (Table 2, Columns I, II and III). Note that Korea is the only presidential system in our sample, where the President is elected directly from popular vote for one 5-year term (re-election is forbidden). Although political parties in Korea are not centralized, and often split and merge and change their names, the Presidential election is a highly majoritarian competition because there is only one winner. Two candidates often fight in the final race, and, constitutionally, the winner is endowed with the agenda setting power – unlike the US President (Estévez-Abe and Kim, 2014). In Korea and Spain, as Column II indicates, the government changes only when the President/Prime Minister ends her or his term or loses a national election.

Table 2.

Institutional context of party competition.

	I. Number of governments (2000–2013)	II. Prime Minister/President serves full term)	III. Dominant government type (2000–2013)	IV. Effective number of parliamentary parties range between largest and smallest values (2000–2013)	V. Electoral System in (When bi-cameral, the Lower Chamber))
Italy	7	Not always	Coalition	3.52 (2013)–5.45 (2000)	(1933–2005) SMD-PR Mixed system (post-2005) PR
Japan	13	Not always	Coalition	2.10 (2009)–3.17 (2000)	Post-2004 SMD-PR Mixed system
Korea	5	Always	Single party	2.28 (2012)–2.93 (2008)	SMD-PR Mixed system Presidential election is de facto SMD
Spain	4	Always	Single party	2.34 (2008)–2.61 (2011)	PR

Source: Columns I, II, III and IV by Armingeon et al. (2014). The data on Korea have been provided by Jae-jin Yang, Yonsei University.

SMD: single member district; PR: proportional representation.

Italy and Japan, in contrast, have been quite different: each government was much more short-lived (Columns I and II). Governments tended to be coalition-based and changed more frequently (Columns I and III). Yet, there are important differences between Italy and Japan. During the 2000–2013 period, a conservative coalition ruled Japan except for a 2.5-year interruption between 2009 and 2012, while Italy experienced more frequent alternations in power between Center-Left and Center-Right coalitions. A credible threat to the dominant conservative party’s hold on power rarely existed in Japan except for this brief period in the latter half of the 2000s. Even if we extend the period coverage and include the 1990s, the overall picture does not change. Although the Italian party system is more fragmented than in Japan (see Column IV), the practice of pre-electoral alliances in Italy has allowed political parties to form two camps for electoral purposes since the electoral reform in 1993 (Bardi, 2007; Katz, 2006).

We argue that these differences are responsible for producing very different policy outcomes in our four cases. In Korea and Spain, voters know that the winning party sets policy for several years to come. This encourages more intense policy-based competition between the parties at every election cycle. Government stability and the concentration of agenda setting power in the hands of the government mean that electoral pledges are more likely to become policies in Korea and Spain. In contrast, in Italy and Japan, even when an intense policy debate arises at the election time, frequent government changes and the coalitional nature of most governments weakens the link between electoral promises and policy outcomes. Furthermore, the much lower unionization rates in Korea and Spain compared to Italy and Japan means that the more left-leaning parties have had to mobilize unorganized voters, which further intensifies policy competition.

Institutional channels of deliberation and ‘problem-oriented’ policy shifts

Problem-oriented policy shifts occur when stakeholders come to share the same view of a policy problem and, eventually, the same solutions. It thus involves a more bottom-up process than the top-down decision-making in ‘election-oriented’ policy shifts. The specific programmatic designs of pre-existing social policies are critical because they shape the constellation of stakeholders and their interests (Palier, 2010; Pierson, 1994). If the majority of stakeholders see no policy problems, there will be no ‘problem-oriented’ policy shifts. However, a shared understanding of policy problems per se is not enough to produce a solution. A formal policy arena where the stakeholders come together and deliberate and negotiate on possible solutions is another precondition for ‘problem-oriented’ reforms.

Although universalistic childcare for very young children and LTC were similarly absent in our four familialist countries, when nursing homes and social care services existed, the access was similarly restricted. However, the specific designs of relevant programmes such as healthcare and disability programmes varied to a much greater degree. Demographic ageing pushes up the healthcare cost in any country, but, in familialist countries, the shortage of nursing care often leads middle-class families to use hospital beds for the care of their elderly parents. Among our four countries, Japan is the only country with a highly fragmented social insurance-based healthcare system with a complicated fiscal transfer scheme. The other three countries, in contrast, have much more universalistic healthcare systems: Korea is more contribution-based than Spain and Italy, and Italy has the most universalistic healthcare system. The fiscal reliance on employers’ and employees’ social contribution in Japan affected the degree to which unions and employers would be sensitive to healthcare costs in ways that they would not be in universalistic healthcare systems funded by general tax revenues (Kato, 2010). Different healthcare designs meant that cost sensitivity was highest in Japan followed by Korea, Spain and finally Italy.

Furthermore, other related programmes mattered too. Italy had introduced a non-means-tested care allowance scheme for the disabled (indennità di accompagnamento) as early as the 1980s (Da Roit et al., 2007). Today about 70 percent of the recipients of this cash benefit (around €508 a month in 2014) consist of frail elderly people who require assistance in their daily life. As there is no restriction on how the money is spent, this allowance encouraged a reliance on cheap migrant care workers (Van Hooren, 2012). In sum, the differences in pre-existing social policies created very different situations in Italy and Japan: the shortage of LTC – and the medicalization of care – became a big cost issue in Japan, while the Italian cash allowance eased the pressure on the government to intervene into LTC. What is important is that the supply of cheap migrant care workers also affects the severity of care shortage: it was abundant in Italy and Spain but not in Korea and Japan.

Of the four countries under study here, Japan was the only one with a long tradition of having formal deliberation councils (shingikai) within the government – Korea has this albeit to a lesser extent (Schwartz, 1998; Yang, 2010). Deliberation councils involve stakeholders and serve the purpose of getting their approval on potential legislative proposals. When participating stakeholders are key constituent groups of the ruling party, their veto power grows. However, if they all agree on a solution, the agreement has a better chance of becoming policy without much political drama. We argue that such an agreement was formed in the case of LTC in Japan.

Evidence from process tracing

This section traces the policy developments in the four countries to support our claim that (1) defamilialization of care in Korea and Spain took the form of election-oriented policy shifts, (2) no election-oriented policy shifts occurred in Italy and Japan, and (3) when Japan implemented a big policy shift, it occurred as a ‘problem-oriented’ policy shift.

Electoral mobilization and politics of defamilialization in Korea and Spain

The first Korean president from the opposition party, Kim Dae-Jung (1998–2003), won by mobilizing voters’ discontent in the post-Asian financial crisis (note that the last name comes first in Korea). He rode to victory by promising more welfare benefits and services (see Sacchi and Rho in this issue). In addition to strong support from his region, he had the support of progressive voters and activists (many of whom had fought for the democratization of Korea in the 1980s). After he came to power, Kim Dae-Jung created a Ministry of Gender in 2000 and brought feminists – his supporters – into the policy circle (Estévez-Abe and Kim, 2014). The direct mandate from the President provided these new so-called femocrats with political capital. As a result, gender issues and NSR particularly pertinent to women gained bureaucratic attention. It is worth noting here that innovative and highly symbolic policies such as gender quotas were also legislated for during this period – although the law was not strictly enforced (Yoon and Shin, 2015). We can see that policies that promise big societal change were effective electoral tools in Korea.

Yet, it was another progressive President, Roh Moon Hyun (2003–2008), who introduced path-shifting policies in favour of the defamilalization of care (Baek et al., 2011; Song, 2010). Roh, who lacked the strong regionally based support of his predecessor, saw policy-based electoral mobilization as a necessity (Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014). During his presidential bid, he promised to expand childcare as well as LTC services (Yang, 2015: Chapter 6). Once elected, he introduced a very ambitious childcare-doubling plan (Saessak Plan) and legislated a new LTC insurance (for childcare, see Estévez-Abe and Kim, 2014; Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014; and for LTC, Choi, 2014; Lee and Cho, 2012).

While President Kim was the first to set up a Presidential Commission to consider major LTC reform, his main reason for doing so was to contain healthcare costs (Lee and Cho, 2012). Yet, under Roh’s Presidency, the LTC reform was not merely treated as ‘problem-oriented’ policy shift as it was in Japan. As Soma (2012: 89–92) demonstrates, the defamilialization of care in both childcare and elderly care were embedded in Roh’s broader ‘The First Healthy Family Plan’ (2006), which considered gender equality within and outside of the family to be an important component of a better family life. In fact, President Roh’s agenda was to mobilize support against, as it were, the Old Korea. We can see that the Roh government’s Family Plan also called for eliminating patriarchal elements from the civil law (Soma, 2012). Moreover, the gender quota was revised and effectively implemented in the national elections in 2004 during Roh’s presidency (Yoon and Shin, 2015). The percentage of women in the parliament began to increase after 2004. While Fleckenstein and Lee (2014) attribute policy shifts to women’s attitudinal shifts, that is not what happened in Korea. Figure 4, which compares the percentage of women who think being a housewife is as fulfilling as working for pay, indicates that a big shift came after – and not before – Roh’s Presidency.

Figure 4.

Positive attitudes on being a housewife (female respondents).

When Roh’s term ended, his conservative successors also adopted pro-defamilialization policies. Lee Myung-bak, the conservative presidential candidate, pledged to provide universal childcare for all preschool children during the presidential election campaign. While President Lee (2008–2013) only implemented the first step (universal care for 0- to 2- and 5-year-olds), his successor, another conservative President, Park Guen Hye, implemented universal childcare for all preschoolers. Universal childcare was a big electoral issue, which both Park and her opponent made the pledge to implement. We see how the majoritarian electoral dynamics combined with the President’s strong agenda setting power motivated and facilitated Korea’s push for defamilialization of care.

Of course, this is not to say that the Korean Presidents ignored societal and economic groups. Defamilialization of care was framed in such a way as to cultivate political support. It was not a coincidence that Korea opted for the private provision of formal care services in both childcare and LTC. The government used the economic rationale of creating new service sector jobs and of activating female labour in the context of a shrinking population – something that was supported by businesses and economic bureaucrats as well (Fleckenstein and Lee, 2014, for childcare). This is similar to what Morel (2007) has observed in Europe.

We find similar election-based policy shifts in Spain. For most of the period under study here, Spain was characterized by majoritarian electoral and party dynamics. The two major parties – Socialists (Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE)) and Conservatives (People’s Party (PP)) – alternated in power (Hopkin, 2005). The PSOE (in power 1982–1996 and 2004–2011) played a critical role in seizing upon gender equality as a value issue to mobilize voters against the conservative PP. In 1988, PSOE, in its attempt to remain in power, adopted an offensive strategy: it implemented a gender quota to contrast itself to PP. The PP responded to the challenge by also embracing a gender quota in its attempt to signal a break from its authoritarian predecessors under General Franco’s regime. Consequently, the percentage of female politicians in Spain reached almost Nordic levels. Felipe González’s PSOE government (1982–1996) also created the Instituto de la Mujer (Women’s Institute) at the national as well as local levels and institutionalized ‘femocrats’ – in a similar way to President Kim in Korea.

When the PP led by José María Aznar seized power in 1996, it did not roll back PSOE’s gender equality policies. Instead, it pursued a defamilialization policy with a conservative touch by publicly subsidizing private care services. (Recall that the Korean conservative Presidents opted for similar policy tools.) Aznar’s National Plan for Family Support aimed at promoting women’s entry into the labour market. In 2002, Aznar introduced a monthly tax benefit for formally employed mothers with children under the age of 3 years as a way of subsidizing childcare costs.The sum of tax subsidy was around €100 a month, which is equivalent to around one-third to one-fourth of the price of a full-time childcare place with a meal service (León, 2011). This policy specifically targeted working mothers, who tended to be better educated than non-working mothers.

The big push for defamilialization occurred when the PSOE (led by Zapatero) came back to power (2004–2011). The Zapatero government pledged to create a National System of Care for Dependent People (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013; Sarasa, 2011: 249). Again the process was very similar to that of Korea. Under the contributory healthcare insurance in Spain, the use of medical services in lieu of nursing services was proving to be very expensive and some form of cost containment was needed (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013: 205). The reform of LTC had been on the agenda from the 1990s, and the PP government had kept it on the agenda but as a low priority issue (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013). The abrupt change came when, in its effort to seize the power back from PP, PSOE included it as a high priority issue in the 2004 elections (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013). The PSOE advocated both a tax-funded design – as demanded by the employers, who did not want to shoulder any more social security contribution – and formal care services over cash benefits – as demanded by the unions who wanted to create jobs (Rodríguez and Marbán, 2013). The ambitious LTC reform, La Ley de Dependencia (2006), had a social democratic touch of promising universal access to formal care services. In addition, in 2008, the national government created the Plan Educa3 with an aim to increase public childcare services for children aged 0–3 years (León, 2011).

As in Korea under Roh, the overall policy agenda aimed at making a big political splash. The big LTC reform and the childcare expansion were legislated as Zapatero introduced a series of high profile policies to change the legal system surrounding the family such as legalization of gay marriage (2005) and the National Equality Law (2007; León, 2011: 67–68). León (2011: 69) interprets the LTC reform in 2006 as the first official recognition of the gendered nature of care. However, regardless of the government intention, both the new LTC and the childcare expansion policies were not fully implemented because of the Eurozone crisis that severely limited the government expenditures in Spain (Aguilar Hendrickson, 2014; León, 2011; León and Pavolini, 2014).

Relative absence of election-oriented policy shifts in Italy and Japan

In Italy, two broad alliances – Center-Right and Center-Left – competed against each other under the post-1993 electoral system, which had introduced a majoritarian element into Italian politics (Bardi, 2007; Bartolini and D’Alimonte, 1995; Katz, 2006). This led to the emergence of various important policy initiatives. The Center-Left governments (1996–2001) introduced new innovative family policies, giving regions and local level institutions more resources for children’s development (Act 285/97), bringing third sectors in social service provisions (Act 328/2000), and establishing a portion of parental leave as fathers’ individual entitlement – not transferable to mothers (Act 53/2000; Da Roit and Sabatinelli, 2013; León and Pavolini, 2014; Naldini and Saraceno, 2008). Clearly, there was an attempt to mobilize along new social values. The Center-Right government by Berlusconi (2001–2006) also responded to childcare needs but in a different way. Instead of expanding governmental investment in early childcare facilities for children aged 0–2 years, it opted for a legal reform to lower the entry age into preschools from 3 years down to 2 years as a way of extending the statutory childcare coverage (León and Pavolini, 2014). It also promoted the role of enterprises (employers) in providing childcare for children under the age of 3 years thereby supporting working mothers. Another Center-Left government, albeit short-lived (2006–2008), introduced a National Extraordinary Crèches Plan – a plan to invest about €800 million (with one-third of it to be co-funded by regional authorities; Riva, 2015). The target was to create 65,000 childcare places – equivalent to an increase in roughly 4 percent of the number of places for children aged under 3 years (Sabatinelli, 2010). The subsequent Center-Right government (2008–2011), however, chose to pursue a different policy path.

In sum, we observe the germs of election-oriented mobilization in Italy, even if this mobilization never took off. It certainly fell short of the kind of election-oriented politics that occurred in Spain. Unlike in Spain, where one party could claim political credit, Italian Center-Left governments were multi-party coalition governments. In that context, making high stake policy shifts would not generate clear electoral gains for any specific party in the next round of elections. Furthermore, the Prime Minister’s policy capacity was more limited in Italy when compared to Spain as its governments changed much more frequently and its strong constitutional court could overturn government’s decisions. For instance, when the Italian Center-Left pushed for a gender quota in politics, the constitutional court in 2003 struck it down as unconstitutional (Montalti, 2003).

Compared to the other three cases, electoral mobilization was weakest in Japan. The dominance of one party – the conservative Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) – had a lot to do with it: the opposition parties were rarely credible contenders to power except for a few years in the late 2000s. That said, when a group of LDP members split the party, ousted the LDP government by means of a successful non-confidence vote, and formed the first non-LDP multi-party coalition government in 40 years in 1993, politics did change (Estévez-Abe, 2008; Reed and Thies, 2001). The first non-LDP government, although very short-lived, put new gender equality and childcare issues on the agenda in its attempt to seek electoral support from those voters who were frustrated with the long conservative LDP rule (Peng, 2002). However, the non-LDP government fell apart before its first budgeting season was completed. The LDP came back to power by successfully forming a LDP-led coalition. Different LDP-led coalition governments that followed absorbed some of the non-LDP government policies, including the Council of Gender, the Gender Equality Plan, the Gender Equal Society Plan and a childcare expansion plan called the New Angel Plan – named after the previous government’s Angel Plan (Peng, 2002). However, this was done more out of coalition dynamics and not as a result of majoritarian policy contests as in Korea and Spain (Estévez-Abe, 2008).

Like Italy, Japan too reformed its electoral system in a majoritarian direction by introducing in 1994 a mixture of proportional representation and first-past-the-post system (Reed and Thies, 2001). However, it took a long time for the fragmented opposition parties to form a common front against the LDP. Because the Italian-style pre-electoral alliances did not exist in Japan, competition between two major alliances – Center-Left versus Center-Right – that emerged in Italy soon after the electoral reform did not emerge in Japan until much later. The delay in the emergence of a credible contender party to the LDP meant that the LDP remained the only viable option as a governing party, thereby reducing the impact of policy contestation during elections. Frequent changes in Prime Ministers and frequent reshuffling of cabinet positions also blurred the link between electoral pledges and government policies.

A real competition only emerged in the mid-2000s, when a number of opposition parties merged to create the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a Center-Left party. Electoral competition became more policy-focused (Estévez-Abe, 2008). When the DPJ finally seized power in 2009, it tried to cut the generous tax deductions for male breadwinner headed families in order to fund NSR programmes. However, yet again, this non-LDP government only lasted for 3 years. Its electoral defeat in 2012 and the subsequent fragmentation of the party system significantly reduced any further political competition in Japan.

Problem-oriented policy shifts: the LTC insurance in Japan

Japan’s major policy shift that resulted in the LTC insurance did not happen as an election-oriented policy shift as in Korea and Spain. For the reasons mentioned earlier, the Japanese highly fragmented contributory healthcare system made unions and employers highly conscious of rising costs of the medicalization of elderly care. The Ministry of Welfare, aware of the systemic policy pressure, began to seek ways to promote nursing and homecare services in the early 1990s (Campbell and Ikegami, 2000; Estévez-Abe, 2008: 247–51). The Ministry used its deliberation councils (shingikai) to build and share a particular understanding of the care crisis. These councils involved all stakeholders in elderly welfare and healthcare policies and served as an arena, where they met and deliberated on the ministerial proposals. Stakeholders included municipal welfare agencies, municipal governments, municipal healthcare insurance funds, occupational healthcare funds, employers and unions – all of whom were negatively affected by the rising healthcare cost of the elderly. The goal was to introduce a new insurance scheme, which also the elderly would contribute to as a way of sharing the burden of ageing society.

Governments changed so frequently from one coalition to another, but the Ministry used these councils to keep the negotiations going. The Ministry predicted that prime age workers – even men – would need to interrupt work to care for their parents. For the business world, the Ministry framed the problem as an opportunity to promote the growth of new industries – private care services and related care equipment industries (Estévez-Abe, 2008: 247–51). The Ministry was very keen on promoting private services as a way of getting businesses interested in the economic prospects of the new ‘LTC industry’, which was beginning to grow (Nihon Keizai Shinbun, 9 March 1995: 38; 7 April 1995: 27). The Ministry, fearful that cash allowances to family care would stifle the growth of formal services and be too costly, preferred not to provide cash allowance (Campbell et al., 2010). The negotiations among the stakeholders continued for several years as different governments came and went until the new LTC insurance became a law in 1997, which was implemented in 2000.

In Italy, no major reform in LTC took place. Since the 1990s, governments attempted to retrench the pre-existing carer’s allowance and divert the resources to build public service provisions for LTC. In 1997, for instance, the Onofri Commission recommended the introduction of a LTC system (León and Pavolini, 2014). The retrenchment of a popular non-means-tested cash benefit is always difficult (Da Roit and Naldini, 2010; Da Roit and Sabatinelli, 2013; Ranci et al., 2008). Instead, families with economic resources resorted to hiring cheap migrant workers as informal caregivers, giving rise to what Bettio et al. (2006) have named ‘migrant-in-the-family’ model.

In short, despite the similar initial characteristics of the familialist quartet, it is significant that within the family divergence has emerged in the past 20 years as a result of different institutional configurations.

Conclusion

This article has put forth a new institutional argument to explain why the four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – pursued different policy trajectories in the past 15 years. The article shows that big policy shifts in care regimes have happened outside the Northern Continental European countries, which the NSR literature typically fixates on. Our broader comparison has enabled us to reveal puzzling cross-national variations that do not emerge from North–South comparisons within Europe. While North–South comparisons tend to highlight cultural factors and the role of social democracy, we have demonstrated how specific configurations of political institutions fundamentally condition the contours of politics – making bold policy shifts more likely in some countries but less likely in others.

In Korea and Spain, where the two largest parties competed over selling new policies to voters, and had the institutional capacity to implement them once they gain power, electoral contestation often involved promises of big policy changes. For the sake of convenience, we have named this political dynamic ‘election-oriented’. Despite being located on the opposite sides of the planet, similar institutional dynamics produced big policy shifts in the two countries – although the Euro-crisis dramatically stalled Spain’s capacity to implement legislated changes. This is a similarity that no existing work has ever noted.

We have also shown the existence of different political paths to ‘defamilialization of care’. As Japan’s major innovation in LTC shows, the politics of defamilialization can also take place in a less visible ‘problem-oriented’ way. The Japanese LTC reform involved neither policy contestation nor mobilization of voters. What matters for ‘problem-oriented’ politics is the existence of institutional channels, which involve all stakeholders in policy negotiations in a sustained manner regardless of government turnovers. Certainly, as the contrast between Italy and Japan in this article indicates, pre-existing social policies filter socio-economic changes making policy pressures bigger in some countries and smaller in others. They also shape the constellation of stakeholders and their interests in specific ways (Palier, 2010; Pierson, 1994). However, it is the institutional structure that ultimately determines whether a government can impose losses in exchange for gains. Japan could but Italy could not.

Studies that focus on political institutions have debated whether coalition-based consensus democracies or majoritarian democracies favoured bigger welfare states or not (Bawn and Rosenbluth, 2006; Crepaz, 1998; Persson et al., 2007). Theoretically, this article contributes to the institutional literature of welfare politics in a novel way. It explores the very different effects of similar political institutions, examining specific causal mechanisms that affect political leaders’ actions. As the excellent review article by Häusermann et al. (2013) highlights, there is a new wave of institutional analysis of welfare states developing today. This new wave pays close attention to electoral rules and party systems – something that the old comparative welfare state research did not. Our article contributes to this burgeoning literature.

Finally, we want to close this article with a call for more comparative welfare state studies that go beyond the geographical confines of Europe. Once we go beyond North–South comparisons within Europe, the ‘usual suspects’ lose much of their explanatory power as most of the advanced industrial countries in Asia lack social democracy. In this article, we hope to have demonstrated the intellectual merits of cross-regional comparisons.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Traute Meyer and the two anonymous reviewers for their extremely useful suggestions and comments.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2013S1A3A2052898). Estévez-Abe’s research was also supported by Abe Fellowship funded by the Center for Global Partnership and administered by the Social Science Research Council.

Notes

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