Pressures Towards and within Universalism: Conceptualizing Change in Care Policy and Discourse

The paper will look at discourses and policy agenda setting, framing developments in care for the two extremes of the life cycle, children and older people, at both supranational and national levels and since the 1990s until today. While most of the institutional changes taking place in LTC and ECEC since the early 1990s have been already described and critically discussed (see for instance Ranci & Pavolini, 2013; Pfau-Effinger and Rostgaard, 2011), only a few analyses have comprehensively considered so far the role played by ideas about care and their relations with reforms and policy change. And yet, the manner in which the ideational foundation for the care policies is framed has many different implications as decisions about care responsibility, needs and what constitutes good care imply normative assumptions regarding family obligations, gender relationships, professionalism, and the role of the State, the market, the third sector and local communities. In an attempt to fill in this gap, our focus will be on paradigmatic changes with regards the notion of universalism. Drawing on Hall (1993), an analytical framework for the understanding of paradigmatic change includes looking at the changes in principles, logics, and institutional instruments of the welfare state. The paper will look at the main tensions and dilemmas, namely marketisation and re-familisation trends within the paradigm of universalism and how these trends have evolved in LTC and ECEC respectively