“Post-Feminist” Era of Social Investment and Territorial Welfare? Exploring the Issue Salience and Policy Framing of Child Care in U.K. Elections 1983-2011

Earlier work has tended to overlook the formative origins of childcare policy in liberal democracies. Accordingly, this study examines mandate-seeking andparties’ envisioning of child care with reference to issue salience and policy framingin party manifestos in U.K. Westminster and regional elections. It reveals a significantincrease in issue salience following its emergence as a manifesto issue in the 1980s,thereby confirming it as part of the wider rise of “valence politics.” The framing datareveal that a “post-feminist” discourse of “social investment” has generally displacedthe political framing of child care as a gender equality issue. It is argued that thisis inherently problematic and reflects parties’ failure to address ongoing genderinequality in the labor market. Notably, the data also illustrate the way devolution isleading to the territorialization of child care in the United Kingdom—no longer solelymandated in Westminster elections, policy is now contingent on the discursive practicesof regional party politics and shaped by local socio-economic factors