Welfare states have been under severe budgetary pressures, however family policies were expanded in most OECD countries. Governments might use family policy reforms for affordable credit claiming. Due to their low level of development, expansions of reconciliation policies are affordable and visible. Following the electoral cycle theory, governments introduce popular reforms close to upcoming elections. However, since policy changes are signals by incumbent parties to their electorate, party's ideology will affect the policy content.

How does the electoral cycle in interaction with incumbent parties' ideology affect the timing and content of parental, maternity, and paternity leave policy reforms? The likelihood of expansions will increase with time left to the next election and pro-equality parties will strategically time defamilising reforms and traditional morality parties time familising reforms. The hypotheses are tested with a dataset of monthly policy changes of leave programmes extracted from Leave Network reports and the Social PoLicy Archive (SPLASH) for family policy reforms between 1995 and 2018 in Austria, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and United Kingdom (1.391 cabinet-months observations). The dependent variables are a monthly dummy variable for occurrence of expansions and monthly dummy variables for familising and defamilising content. The independent variables are time remaining to the next election, and the cabinet's Pro-Equality and Traditional-Morality ideology. I use a logit regression model to estimate the probability that a cabinet introduces an expansion in given month and an interaction between time left and the ideology variables to estimate the probability that a cabinet introduces a familising / defamilising reform.