3. Comparing Family Policy Actors

2002 pp 68 £6.50; also available online with password (click here)

Editors: Louise Appleton and Linda Hantrais

Contributors: Peter Ackers, Louise Appleton, Paul Byrne

The papers in this collection report on the findings from interviews with political, economic and civil society actors in the eight EU member states and three candidate countries in the IPROSEC project. The interviews were designed to investigate the policy process and develop a greater understanding of national policy responses to socio-demographic change. The authors compare the involvement of different actors in family policy and analyse their accounts of how it is formulated and implemented. In his discussion of political actors, Paul Byrne acknowledges the impact of party politics on how policies develop. Legitimacy of state intervention in family life and policy focus are presented as possible explanations for cross-national variations. Peter Ackers’ paper on economic actors assesses the contributions made by employers’ representatives and trade unions to family policy. Major differences in workplace attitudes and approaches to family policy across and within countries are attributed to welfare policies, the perceived legitimacy of intervention in family life, changing family structures and gender roles, the policy environment and employer relations at national and workplace levels. Louise Appleton’s paper considers national variations in the roles of the civil society sector in the family policy process and relates them to social perceptions of the legitimacy of policy intervention in family life, the competing or complementary roles of the other sectors, and the functions of nonprofits as lobbyists or specialists in policy implementation and service delivery. The concluding paper, also by Louise Appleton, identifies two policy network models among the countries analysed. The first is integrated, with close cooperation between policy actors, although only in one country are the roles of policy actors harmonized. In the second model, the three sectors are perceived as separate entities with distinct family policy agendas, minimum cooperation and varying degrees of segregation.