This panel brings together scholars that come from different disciplines (sociology and political science) and perspectives (political economy, social policy, ethnic and migration studies). In addition, papers will address the issue in historical and cross-national perspective. Yet they all narrow in one key issue: the politics behind the fact that domestic services are “back in town,” back in global cities in any case.  While most migration studies have focused on domestic employees, political economists have been quick to explain the fact that welfare services are provided at home as a feature of restructuring in “hard times” with an ageing population, stressing the role of socio-demographic factors and thus turning the politics behind this return to the past into a black box and ignoring cross-national variation in policies affecting domestic services -- a continuum from no policy to generous tax deduction-- and in the type and extent of domestic services  (e. g. for the old or the young.). Let’s bring comparative politics back in! That’s the motto of this panel. Eleonore Kofman and Margarita Estevez-Abe will provide us with a historically-informed theoretical  framework to understand the different uses of domestic services in contemporary Europe. Both Eleonore Kofman and Nathalie Morel will analyze EU and expert discourses on the matter and their underpinnings. Nathalie Morel will start also presenting case studies where tax policies encourage the use of domestic services (France and Sweden). The two last papers on France and Belgium will go more into depth into the policy dynamics and feedbacks of tax exemptions for domestic services, a welfare state for the rich always presented as good for job creation yet that is costly and thus requires a nitty-gritty analysis of the creation of a new economic sector and interest group. Franca van Hooren who has just finsihed a comparative research project on domestic work in Italy, the Netherlands and the UK will dicuss the papers.