Duration:
01 March 2025 - 29 February 2028

Research Team:
Dr. Johanna Fischer

Across Europe, long-term care (LTC) for older persons has become a salient topic. As the predominant provid-ers of LTC are (still) informal care givers – mostly female family members – they often face the issue of com-bining paid work and care. Care leave, which allows a temporary withdrawal from employment to engage in care work, constitutes an increasingly popular policy measure for supporting work-care conciliation. Care leave poli-cies are very heterogenous, for instance as regards target group, duration and payment. However, there are insufficient studies dealing with the existence and characteristics of leave schemes for care givers of older per-sons with LTC needs. The project addresses this gap by describing and explaining LTC leave design in interna-tional-comparative perspective. In doing so, I employ my novel, two-dimensional conceptualisation of social policy generosity, consisting of inclusiveness as the personal dimension and scope of benefit as the material dimension. The project makes two main contributions. Firstly, I generate a comprehensive, original dataset on the generosity of LTC leave schemes for 27 European Union (EU) member states. Secondly, drawing on welfare state theories, I investigate which explanatory factors influence the generosity design of LTC leave policies in Europe. I employ fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis for identifying which care regime institutions and socio-economic factors condition generous LTC leave. Complementing this cross-country analysis, I compara-tively study LTC leave policies in two cases – Austria and Germany – with similar welfare and care arrangements to investigate in-depth how political factors and discourses have shaped the divergent care leave design in both countries.

The project is funded by the Central Research Development Fund of the University of Bremen as part of the funding line "Independent projects for postdocs" for three years.

Duration:
01 March 2025 - 29 February 2028

Research Team:
Dr. Johanna Fischer

Project Type:
Third-party funded project