The State of Care: Rethinking the Distributive Effects of Familial Care Policies in Liberal Welfare States

Abstract:     
The Paper offers a new analytical framework for the study of the regulation of family relations. The framework builds on distributive models of the welfare state, and goes beyond the family-state dyad to include the market as a sphere in which the family is meaningfully regulated. The offered framework challenges the traditional boundaries of family law and suggests an understanding of the institution of the family as defined through its interaction with the institutions of the labor market and the welfare state. The framework is applied to welfare state regimes of familial care in the United States and Israel-child care in the United States (federal), and long-term care for the elderly in Israel. The comparative distributive analysis shows that viewing the family from outside traditional Family Law leads to a relaxation of some of the exceptional characteristics of the legal concept of the family, as well as to a realization that family regulation is intimately connected to broad social policy debates about citizenship, social status, labor market, and wealth distribution.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 34

Keywords: Family, Welfare State, Comparative Law, Care Work, Gender, Household Division of Labor, Social Policy, Israel

Accepted Paper Series