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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the ongoing changes in German family policy. It explores the issue of whether the German welfare state, in this policy field, can still be regarded as a conservative welfare model or rather approaches a more liberal or social democratic model. A qualitative method is used to analyze the material, especially from the German government, including press releases, other public documents and also articles from the political weekly magazines Der Spiegel and Die Zeit. The changes analyzed are the new parental benefit, the expansion of child care, the concept of whole-day schools and the system of joint taxation. The point of departure is Gösta Esping-Andersen’s categorization of three types of welfare states: the social democratic, the conservative and the liberal. Esping-Andersen uses two tools, decommodification and social stratification, to determine which welfare model a country is placed in. My analysis of German family policy shows that the German welfare model is going to be more towards a social democratic model than a conservative welfare model.

Parental leave policies have been shown to play a significant role in enhancing gender equality. The European Union has recognised this and has issued a Directive to its Member States, in order to instigate parental leave policy reform. However, not all Member States have sought to implement this. This thesis addresses this problem and seeks to answer the following research question: Why have progressive parental leave policies failed to transfer across the European Union? In doing so, this study also aims to explore the limits of Europeanisation. The research question has been addressed through a qualitative comparative case study of four European Union Member States: Sweden, Denmark, Hungary and Greece. These states have been chosen on the basis of Most Different System Design. The thesis deploys a theoretical framework based upon concepts of Europeanisation and policy mobility and draws particularly on the work of Stone’s four core concepts of policy mobility: Diffusion, Transfer, Convergence, Translation (Stone, 2012). The key factors that have been identified in this study as restricting the potential of a policy to transfer are: institutional surroundings, shared beliefs and norms, internal political dynamics and a lack of force/action from the European Union. These differences have acted to constrain the transferability of progressive parental leave policy across the European Union and therefore the process of Europeanisation in this area.

The introduction of the European union’s pillar of social rights has marked a new chapter in EU social policy. The social policy of the union has been seen to affect the national welfare state of its members causing convergence between member states. Given that welfare politics is a salient issue of the electorate, this thesis aims at finding out what type of welfare regime is most prevalent in EU social pillar policy in order to identify the direction the EU is pushing its member states. By using a content analysis to examine policy initiatives within the scope of the social pillar through the lens of the theoretical framework of Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare regimes, this thesis identifies a considerable prevalence of a social democratic welfare regime. Especially given the sizeable occurrence of universalism and defamiliarization in the analysed material. This shows that policy convergence between the member states will entail a considerable role of the state, universal welfare services and promoting female participation in the labour market.

This paper aims to describe the dynamics of objective health and welfare in five populations, from the year 2000 to 2009, qua a methodological study. It proposes a three step approach to ensure the validity criteria in the conducted research process: firstly, to identify the relevant variables as predictors of the two phenomena, empiric studies and sociological theories by Esping-Andersen (1999) Nussbaum (1999, 2000, 2011), were consulted. This (with the data availability) frames the study to include five related categories of objective health and welfare indicators, including (1) demographic (e. g. life expectancy (LE), total fertility rate (TFR)), (2) child-welfare (i. e. under-five mortality rate (U5MR), (3) welfare services (immunization coverage and prevalence of tuberculosis (TB)), (4) education, and (5) indicators on health expenditure (HE). The applied theoretical frame–in a combination with the four posed research questions–indicates a need of an overall methodological approach that is primary quantitative. The data analysis follows an observational epidemiological type that is descriptive study, to analyse the indicators in five populations and two control groups. The study obtains descriptive data from three data bases, which are selected upon a qualitative analysis, to account for their validity and reliability. Further data analysis is strengthened qua the inclusion of the two control groups of populations, when appropriate. Since it wasn’t possible to compare data on populations across time, due to different data production methodologies. Main findings indicate that HE, immunization, TFR, male and female LE, U5MR and school enrolment, tend to diverge between and within the five populations, expressed in absolute and relative terms. The comparison of the estimated data for the five populations with the two control groups of populations, shows that most objective health and welfare indicators tend to converge, (within categories 1, 2 and 3, except TFR) when expressed in absolute and relative terms. When estimated data is analysed in the light of two sociological theories, it is evident that the existing gap between male and female LE, U5MR, and HE indicators can improve further. / B