This insightful book provides a comprehensive comparative historical analysis of the formation and evolution of Nordic earner-carer policies over five decades. Spanning parental leave, father quotas, daycare services, and cash for childcare allowances, it explores the key roles that ideas and political parties play in the policy reform process.

The five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, are well-known for their extensive welfare system and gender equality which provides both parents with opportunities to earn and care for their children. In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, as well as UK and the US, demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in the Nordic setting through family and social policies, and how these contribute to shaping and influencing the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods. This comprehensive volume will have wide international appeal for those who look to Nordic countries and their success in creating gender equal societies.

Providing a state of the art overview, this comprehensive Handbook is an essential introduction to the subject of Gender and Social Policy. Bringing together original contributions and research from leading researchers it covers the theoretical perspectives of the field, the central policy terrain of gender inequalities of income, employment and care, and family policy. Examining gender and social policy at both the regional and national level, the Handbook is an excellent resource for advanced students and scholars of sociology, political science, women’s studies, policy studies as well as practitioners seeking to understand how gender shapes the contours of social policy and politics.

This volume provides a timely collection of the most germane studies and commentaries on the complex links between recent changes in national economies, welfare regimes, social inequalities, and population health. Drs. Vicente Navarro and Carles Muntaner have selected 24 representative articles, organized around six themes, from the widely read pages of the International Journal of Health Services (2006-2013) - articles that not only challenge conventional approaches to population health but offer new insights and robust results that critically advance public health scholarship. Part I applies a social-conflict perspective to better understand how political forces, processes, and institutions precede and give rise to social inequalities, economic instability, and population health. The need to politicize dominant (neoliberal) ideologies is emphasized, given its explanatory power to elucidate unequal power relations. The next four parts focus on the health impacts of growing inequalities and economic decline on government services and transfers (Part II); labor markets and employment conditions (Part III); welfare states and regimes (Part IV); and social class relations (Part V). Part VI advocates for a more politically engaged approach to population health and presents alternative solutions to achieving egalitarian outcomes, which, in turn, improve health and reduce health inequalities. Taken together, the works in this volume reflect IJHS 's collective commitment to publishing high-impact studies, inspiring fruitful debates, and advancing the discipline in new and essential ways. Emerging and established researchers as well as students and professionals committed to health equity matters will benefit from this book's astute contributions.

For over three decades, mature European welfare states have been on their way into an austerity phase marked by greater needs and more insecure revenues. A number of reform pressures-including population ageing, unemployment, economic globalization, and increased migration-call into question the economic sustainability and normative underpinnings of transfer systems and public services. And while welfare states long seemed resilient to growing challenges, it now seems clear that they are changing. Election Campaigns and Welfare State Change examines how political leaders and the public respond to reform pressures at a pivotal moment in a mass democracy: the election campaign. Do campaigns facilitate debate and attention to welfare state challenges? Do political parties present citizens with distinct choices as to how challenges might be met? Do leaders prepare citizens for the idea that some solutions may be painful? Do their messages have adaptive consequences for how the public perceives the need for reform? Do citizens adjust their normative support for welfare policies in the process? The answers to these questions affect how we understand welfare state change and representative democracy in an era of mounting challenges.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351765633, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. In the 21st century, Norway, Denmark and Sweden remain the icons of fair societies, with high economic productivity and quality of life. But they are also an enigma in a cultural-evolutionary sense: though by no means following the same socio-economic formula, they are all cases of a "non-hubristic", socially sustainable modernity that puzzles outside observers. Using Nordic welfare states as its laboratory, Sustainable Modernity combines evolutionary and socio-cultural perspectives to illuminate the mainsprings of what the authors call the "well-being society". The main contention is that the Nordic uniqueness is not merely the outcome of one particular set of historical institutional or political arrangements, or sheer historical luck; rather, the high welfare creation inherent in the Nordic model has been predicated on a long and durable tradition of social cooperation, which has interacted with global competitive forces. Hence the socially sustainable Nordic modernity should be approached as an integrated and tightly orchestrated ecosystem based on a complex interplay of cooperative and competitive strategies within and across several domains: normative-cultural, socio-political and redistributive. The key question is: Can the Nordic countries uphold the balance of competition and cooperation and reproduce their resilience in the age of globalization, cultural collisions, the digital economy, the fragmentation of the work/life division, and often intrusive EU regulation? With contributors providing insights from the humanities, the social sciences and evolutionary science, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of political science, sociology, history, institutional economics, Nordic studies and human evolution studies.

Anchored in a new theoretical framework that combines the insights of a variety of sociological and political science approaches, this study offers an understanding of the changes in the Mainstream Right’s family policy preferences and their drivers over time and across countries.