Against Your Own Interest? Analysing Social Investment Policy Preferences from a Gender Perspective

In this paper we study support for social investment and protection policies from a gender perspective. With this, we integrate recent insight of the social policy literature into the research on gendered preferences. Based on a novel dataset that provides comparative data on public opinion (the INVEDUC dataset, cf. Busemeyer et al. forthcoming in JESP), we investigate three questions. First, we study whether women are indeed more supportive of social investment policies in general and of particular social investment policies from which they are more likely to benefit (e.g., childcare benefits). We are especially interested here in women’s preferences when the expansion of social investment comes at the expense of traditional social protection policies. More specifically, we investigate whether women would be willing to increase public spending on early childhood education and care, on school education, or on families with young children, even if that implied cutbacks in pensions and unemployment benefits. We link their preferences to their personal situation (education, age, labor market integration, and personal need). Second, we study the preferences of men towards the same questions to complement the insights we gain from the study of gendered preferences. The main question here is: Why are some men more supportive of social investment policies than others? Finally, we are interested in how these relationships play out in different welfare regimes. The INVEDUC data allows some analyses in this respect, as it offers data for eight European countries with very different trajectories of social compensation and social investment, respectively.