Sunday, March 16, 2014
Congressional A (Omni Shoreham)
The social policy literature has reached a certain consensus that European societies are characterized by a similar set of “new social risks” (Armigeon and Bonoli, 2006). An interdisciplinary litterature demonstrates that lone-parent families distil the new social risks as an overwhelmingly feminised group and have a higher risk of poverty (Ananat and Michaels 2008; Whiteford and Adema, 2007; Trifiletti, 2007). Recent research also demonstrates cross-national differences in the single-parent poverty and emphasized the role of social policy settings in various welfare states in shaping the economic security of single-mother families (Rainwater and Smeeding 2004; Brady and Burroway, 2012). This research examines the redesign of social policies to respond to the new risk structures by focusing on the situation of lone-parents in France, Sweden and the United Kingdom; three cases representative of Esping Andersen’s welfare regime typologies. Although the new social risks such as lone-parent families’ poverty are recurrent in these three cases as a result of general demographic and social transformations over the last two decades, the policy responses have varied across countries, where the project aims is to account for these substantial differences using lone-parent families as an empirical terrain to address the question of stability or change in the welfare regime trajectories. This research aim asks whether the attention to new social risks has altered the policy logic of each case (and regime type), setting it on a new trajectory.
