As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden pledged to support paid family leave and childcare. Yet as Democrats seek to secure the necessary votes for the Build Back Better bill—the cornerstone of Biden’s domestic policy agenda—reports indicate that family leave and childcare policies may be scaled back or eliminated.

This virtual special issue brings together recent articles in Politics & Gender to provide background and context for understanding the politics of care. In “Care Ethics and Public Policy: A Holistic, Transformative Approach,” Kari Greenswag argues persuasively:

Policy documents are a source of authority in both a legal and a normative sense. When policy documents make particular assumptions about care work requiring private, not public, consideration, this can push care, its concerns, and those who give and receive care out of the public sphere.

This marginalization, Greenswag shows, is “ethically suspect” and she argues instead for an ethics of care in the development of public policy.

Given women’s traditional roles in the family, childcare policy has the greatest direct effects on women. Yet, in their study of media coverage of the issue in Canada, Rebecca Wallace and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant find that during the Covid pandemic, stories focused on the importance of such policies for public health, economic recovery, and childcare accessibility, leaving the direct effects on women and on household gender dynamics largely out of the conversation.

What makes legislators more likely to support expanded care policies? Women’s commitment to care policy has long been attributed to their socialization and experiences with care roles in the family. In a unique study, Helena Olofsdotter Stensota shows that in Sweden, women MPs prioritize care policy regardless of their own experience with parental leave. Men MPs, however, tend to become more interested in social and family policy after being on parental leave while in office. To the extent to which men increasingly take on care roles, we might expect greater support for these policies.

Care policy reverberates throughout the political and economic system. In a cross-national study, Nicole Detraz and Dursun Peksen find that in countries where governments allocate more fiscal resources to social security, health, and education, women are more likely to participate in the workforce and in national politics. These policies can be particularly mobilizing for women with the heaviest burdens. Across 25 European countries, Jennifer Shore demonstrates that “early childhood expenditures and cash benefits to families are positively related to single mothers’ political participation.”

The politics of care remain central to politics and gender in the United States and around the world. The articles featured in this virtual special issue inform our understanding of both the causes and consequences of care policy.

We are pleased to offer free access to the articles below until the end of 2021.

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