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Consequences of Family Policies on Childbearing Behavior: Effects or Artifacts?
Author(s) -
Neyer Gerda,
Andersson Gunnar
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
population and development review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.836
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1728-4457
pISSN - 0098-7921
DOI - 10.1111/j.1728-4457.2008.00246.x
Subject(s) - positive economics , historical institutionalism , public policy , state (computer science) , welfare state , space (punctuation) , sociology , institutionalism , welfare , empirical research , public economics , economics , epistemology , political science , economic growth , computer science , law , politics , philosophy , algorithm , operating system
This article argues for a more careful consideration of theoretical and methodological approaches in studies of the effects of public policies, labeled here as family policies, on childbearing behavior. We employ elements of comparative welfare‐state research, of the sociology of “constructed categories,” and of “the new institutionalism” to demonstrate that investigations into policy effects need to contextualize policies and need to reduce their complexity by focusing on “critical junctures,”“space,” and “uptake.” We argue that the effects of family policies can only be assessed properly if we study their impact on individual behavior. Event‐history models applied to individual‐level data are the state‐of‐the‐art of such an approach. We use selected empirical studies from Sweden to demonstrate that the type of approach that we advocate prevents us from drawing misleading conclusions.