Family policy has become one of the most dynamic areas in welfare state politics. It is marked by unexpected path departure in least-likely countries under fiscal constraints and radical shifts in party agendas. Most conservative parties have switched from traditional to progressive stances, supporting employment-oriented policies and men’s caregiving roles. This has attracted significant scholarly interest in explaining reform trajectories and party shifts. However, existing research often relies on imperfect dependent variable indicators, such as outcome or expenditure measures, which are prone to confounding factors and temporal lags.
This paper presents findings from a novel, hand-coded database of family policy reforms, documenting over 600 policy changes across six conservative welfare states between 1980 and 2019: Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain. By focusing on legal outputs, the database aligns directly policy change with political decision-making, reducing confounding influences present in outcome-based measures. The dataset encompasses reforms in key areas such as parental leave, childcare, family benefits, labour market regulation, and gender equality measures.
Employing autoregression and multivariate linear models, the study tests competing explanations for these reforms, including cabinet composition, public opinion, functional determinants, gender representation, and policy feedback effects. The study offers empirically robust findings for understanding the political drivers of family policy reform, contributing to debates on comparative party politics and welfare state transformation.