Rahim S. Mohamed

My dissertation (completed Summer 2018) gives context to recent family policy advances that have taken place across the high-income Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries - and in particular the relative decline of partisanship as a driver of policy change - by comparing the family policy agendas pursued by two center-right governments over a decade (2005 -- 2015). I find that the administrations led by Stephen Harper (Conservative, Canada) and Angela Merkel (Christian Democrat, Germany) each utilized various family policy proposals instrumentally to broaden their respective electorates. This indicates that increased cross-national awareness of the financial and logistical challenges faced by modern (i.e.: dual-earner and single-parent) families has created new electoral opportunities for parties of both the center-left and center-right, making family policy a robust terrain for party competition. 

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I also find that the specific policy design choices made by each center-right governing party were mediated by the domestic policy discourses engendered within each political environment. In Germany, where Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) unexpectedly championed equitable parental leave and dramatically increased access to publicly-subsidized daycare, CDU officials capitalized on anxieties surrounding the country's stagnant birth rate. By framing its family policy as natalist (versus feminist), the CDU was able to broaden its appeal to middle-income working women (the primary beneficiaries of the reforms) without alienating its traditionalist base. CDU reformers also benefited from issue linkages connecting the new family policies with the socioeconomic integration of migrant women (in the labor market) and children (in German-language early childhood education programs). 

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By contrast, the Canadian political context was more favorable to the Harper government's neofamilial agenda of direct payments to parents and boutique tax credits for children's extracurricular activities. This approach built on the Conservatives' successful championing of `parental choice' during the 2006 federal election campaign - in which child care emerged as a defining issue - and later motivated the opposition parties to follow suit with their own cash-for-care proposals. Birth rate-promoting policies like subsidized child care proved less appealing to the Canadian public due to a general acceptance of immigration as an appropriate mechanism for demographic replacement (despite Canada's own sub-replacement birth rate) and the middling record of the country's lone provincial daycare program, based in the province of Québec. 

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The dissertation is framed as a comparative historical analysis and utilizes a multifaceted methodological approach consisting of: a qualitative assessment of primary and secondary sources; over two dozen elite interviews; and an automated content analysis of over four hundred and fifty relevant newspaper articles.

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