Social investment feedback effects in welfare politics: Evidence from work-family policy reforms

Social investment is not expected to create strong positive feedback effects. While social protection is defended from conservative retrenchment by constituencies of beneficiaries whose income depends on policy continuity, social investment facilitates labour market earnings, weakening incentives to organise once its benefits are realised. This article contributes to the debate arguing that social investment can generate positive but different feedback effects by fostering a supportive public opinion and attracting employers and experts interested in economic growth, thereby fostering their continuity. The argument is tested through work-family policy, a key field of social investment, using an original database of 655 policy changes in childcare, leave, benefits, and family- and gender-related labour-market and pension regulation across six conservative welfare states over a forty-year period. Methodologically, the article introduces a new way to measure policy feedback through the cumulative direction of policy reforms, differentiating here between dual-earner and male-breadwinner trajectories. Interacting this measure with cabinet ideology shows that right-wing cabinets are more likely to adopt male-breadwinner reforms only in conservative institutional contexts. As dual-earner reforms accumulate, partisan differences fade and eventually disappear. This adapts policy feedback theory to social investment and suggests how the institutionalisation of gender economic rights can prevent conservative backlash.