Demography, power resource, globalization, institution, and young child policy variations in an era of retrenchment

During the past few decades, two clear phenomena have emerged that are shared by modern democracies---an increasingly globalized economy and a substantial transformation in the demographics. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement as to what kind of an impact these trends have brought to the current welfare states. The heated debate is: Has social welfare spending retrenched as a result of globalization, which arguably has constrained the capacity of national governments, or, has it expanded instead, both to compensate inequalities generated by globalization, and to meet the rising needs of changing demographics.; This study addresses this controversy by examining whether the magnitude of aggregate welfare spending in general, and young child policies in specific, has retrenched or expanded, based on systematic analysis of the expenditure data derived from the 18 OECD nations from 1980 to 2000. Three major conclusions come from the analysis: (1) The levels and rates of changes on spending reveal quite different stories. From absolute-dollar-value perspective, citizens obtained more public support during the past twenty years. Yet, based on the percentage of GDP, the growth rate of public spending did not catch up with the growing economic pie. (2) The findings showed a mixed picture in terms of how welfare regimes responded to similar challenges: while long-established differences among welfare regimes are still discernible, a converging pattern across regime types has emerged. (3) The analysis supports the argument that "retrenchment" alone cannot fully capture the actual cross-national changing pattern. Rather, current welfare states have been experiencing a "transformation" which comprised of a shift from a traditional "income maintenance" (cash-transfer-oriented) to a "social inclusion" (service-oriented) approach.; Equally important, this study aims to empirically examine the relative importance of economic, demographic, political, and institutional factors on shaping the cross-national variation in young child policies, causal hypotheses derived from convergence theory, power resource theory, and globalization theory are tested by using quantitative pooled regression analysis. Results demonstrate that globalization does not systematically cause a substantial cutback on young child policies. Instead, it is countered by two significant demographic factors: fertility rate and female labor force participation. Results also support power resource theory and institutional theory in that corporatism, partisan effects, and institution structures all have a significant effect on young child policies.