• Margarita Estevez-Abe Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University

• Sawako Shirahase TCJS Director

There is a growing interest in the politics of work-family reconciliation policies. The new scholarly consensus views female voters, who are increasingly better educated and integrated into the labor market, as the main driver of recent policy developments in advanced welfare states. We argue that the transformation of women has also changed men and their family policy preferences. Our paper examines: (i) how education and careers change women’s policy preferences; and (ii) how men’s preferences might change depending on the characteristics of female partners they live with. Our findings highlight intricate ways in which economic interests and gender dynamics intersect to shape the policy preferences of men and women. We find that men in dual-earner households and men partnered with highly educated women are more likely to support family policies but that they support different types of policies. We conduct regression analysis of nineteen OECD countries using the International Social Survey Program data (Family and Changing Gender Roles IV) to substantiate our argument.

Margarita Estévez-Abe is an associate professor of political science at Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University. Before joining Syracuse, she taught at Harvard University before joining Syracuse and was a guest professor at the University of Duisburg and the University of Konstanz in Germany. She was also the Chair of Public Policy at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy (2012-2015). Her research explores the intersection of welfare states, electoral systems, and the models of capitalism. She’s the author of Welfare Capitalism in Postwar Japan, the editor of Outsourcing of Domestic and Care Work (Special Issue, Social Politics), and Beyond Familialism (Special Issue, Journal of European Social Policy).