By Ruth Lister
More than any other welfare state model, the Nordic or social democratic model is not just a label applied by welfare regime analysts but is worn with pride by Scandinavian governments and citizens. In the words of Robert Cox, “the core values of the Scandinavian model are not only important to the scholars who observe the model, but they are widely shared by the citizens of Scandinavian countries and constitute an important component of national identity in those countries” (Cox, 2004: 207). He suggests that it is the belief in the model at the level of an ideal which represents Scandinavian path-dependency, so that policy developments are interpreted so as to fit with the model.
Equality, solidarity and universalism are values, which explicitly underpin the Nordic model's commitment to the principle of inclusionary and equal citizenship – even if that principle is not fully achieved and is under some strain in the face of growing immigration (an issue to which I will return). They are values that are mutu¬ally supportive, as underlined by Esping-Andersen's description of universalist welfare: “the universalistic system promotes equality of status. All citizens are endowed with similar rights, irrespective of class or market position. In this sense, the system is meant to cultivate cross-class solidarity, a solidarity of the nation” (1990: 25).
Moreover, the commitment is not just to equality of status but to what some would call “equality of condition”, an equitable distribution of material resources such as to promote well-being and to enable all citizens to flourish and pursue their own life projects (Levitas, 2004). As far as I can see, this “passion for equality” as it's often described, avoids the false dichotomy between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, which bedevils British debates on the subject. And it integrates the issue of poverty into wider concerns about overall “levels of living” or quality of life rather than ghettoizing it (Lister, 2004).
The emphasis on solidarity translates into a model of citizenship, which places greater emphasis on the bonds between citizens and – to varying extents – participatory citizenship than do those models which focus on the relationship between individuals and the state. At the same time, it is premised on a much more positive construction of the state than exists in liberal models of citizenship. Less distant from civil society and citizens than in many other countries, Kangas and Palme write that historically “the state was not perceived as such a hostile and alien force to the individual as in many other countries” (2005: 19). This may partly explain what appears to be a widespread acceptance of taxation as the necessary means to help make a reality of the values of equality, solidarity and universalism, rather than the resentful grumbling about it as a “burden” in liberal welfare states with much lower levels of taxation.
With its commitment to universalistic tax-funded public services the Nordic state could be described, in some ways, as the “social investment state” avant la lettre. Social investment is widely regarded as key to the new social policy agenda in the EU and wider OECD. In his scientific report commissioned by the Belgian Presidency, Esping-Andersen articulated the general goal of “a child-centred social investment strategy” as the foundation stone for a “new European welfare architecture” (2002: 26ff, 5). He suggests that “perhaps the most important lesson to be learned from Scandinavia is its quite successful investment in preventative measures” (ibid: 14). And while he qualifies that successful with “quite”, it is the Nordic welfare states that emerge time and again as having gone furthest with the kind of social investment strategy he advocates.
A word of caution though. I was invited recently to speak about the “social invest¬ment state” at a seminar on “good childhood – profitable investment” organised by ITLA, the Foundation for the Funding of Finnish Child Research, to discuss the future of policies for children. The social investment strategy propounded by Esping-Andersen and by proponents of the third way tends to put greater emphasis on profitable investment than good childhood. As such it is largely instrumentalist, treating children as citizen-workers of the future, with insufficient focus on children's well-being and citizenship in the here and now (Lister, 2003; 2006).
The Nordic model of child care and education, with its more holistic, peda-gogically-informed approach, has offered a better balance between future-oriented investment and a concern with the child qua child and with good childhood. Helmut Wintersberger (2005), in a book on childhood, suggests that the Nordic model is better equipped to accommodate the rights-oriented approach enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child than Conservative welfare states, where citizenship is more closely tied to labour market status. It is important not to lose sight of the perspective of the child in the face of the promotion in Europe of the more instrumentalist social investment model.
Towards a women-friendly, gender-inclusive citizenship?
Women have also been treated rather instrumentally in that model – with an emphasis on the needs of the labour market, in the context of fertility and wider demographic trends, rather than on gender equality as such. In contrast, Kari Melby's final report in the Nordic research programme, explains that the point of departure for the project on “gender equality and welfare in Scandinavia” is that “gender equality is one characteristic hallmark of the Nordic welfare state model” (Melby, 2006: 1). Indeed, she writes, “gender equality is to be seen as one of the prerequisites for claiming a Nordic model” (even if there are differences between the Nordic countries)(ibid). The original class-based “passion for equality” gradually was extended explicitly to embrace gender so that, according to Arnlaug Leira, gender equality is now “integral to Scandinavian citizenship” (Ellingsæter and Leira, 2006: 7). This shapes the gender culture within which specific policies operate in the Nordic welfare states.
Nevertheless, as the summary for the project on family policies points out, “several studies have documented that there are considerable differences between the Nordic countries with regard to…the extent to which present family policies also integrate gender equality as an explicit political goal” (Anon 2006: 4). And while the Nordic welfare states tend broadly to be characterised as among those that have moved furthest towards a dual-earner or adult-worker model, the policy mechanisms deployed to support those with care responsibilities differ in terms both of the specifics of policy and of the gendered citizenship models underlying them.
More generally, Borchorst and Siim suggest that, even though “scholars agree that it is possible to identify a Nordic gender model in terms of women's political representation and in relation to their participation in paid work”, more detailed analysis reveals “important differences in the form of women's mobilization, their inclusion in political parties as well as the extent of institutionalization of gender equality“ (Borchorst and Siim, 2002: 92).
Just as there are differences between policies for gendered citizenship between the Nordic countries, so there are differences among feminist scholars in their evaluation of the Nordic model. Such differences can reflect differing normative positions as to whether the goal is an ostensibly gender-neutral or an explicitly gender-differentiated model of citizenship or some combination of the two (Lister, 1997/2003). Nordic policy discourses have generally been gender neutral with the explicit aim of promoting equality between women and men. However, some policies, even though still couched in gender-neutral language, arguably are more consistent with gender-differentiated models of citizenship, in which women's particular responsibilities and needs are recognised. The prime example is the Finnish and Norwegian home child care allowance scheme, of which more later.
In contrast, in a classic article, Lewis and Aström argue that Sweden, although not necessarily transcending the dichotomy between equality and difference, “has constructed a distinctive equal opportunity strategy by grafting the right to make a claim on the basis of difference onto a policy based on equal treatment”. More specifically, “since the early 1970s”, they write, “Swedish women have first had to become workers to qualify for parental leave at a favourable benefit level, but paradoxically, having taken a job, they could then exert a claim as mothers and stay home for what has proved to be a steadily lengthening period” (Lewis and Aström, 1992: 75).
Distinctive too among some Nordic welfare states has been the attempt, however tentative, to promote a more gender inclusive model of citizenship in which men as well as women are able to play a part as citizen-earner/carers and carer/earners. This points towards what the political theorist, Nancy Fraser (1997), has termed the universal care-giver model in which men become more like women, rather than the universal breadwinner model in which women are expected to become more like men. Nowhere, needless to say, has achieved the universal care-giver model.
The relative success or not of such policies is important to overall empirically-based judgements as to the extent to which the Nordic welfare states have achieved their goal of gender equality and their potential as “women-friendly” welfare states, following Helga Hernes' much-used term. She defined a women-friendly state as a state which “would not force harder choices on women than on men, or permit unjust treatment on the basis of sex” (1987: 15), although as Borchorst and Siim (2002) point out, it is difficult to operationalise particularly in cross-national analysis.
Again, the degree of progress is a source of dispute between feminist scholars. Crudely, given that I think that all would agree that some progress has been made, particularly when compared with other countries, it is a question of whether the glass is half full or half empty. It is also a question as to “which women?”, for, in the 20 years since Hernes coined the term “women-friendly” state, there has been increased recognition of the diversity among women to the extent that some feminist scholars have now rejected the term as biased in its failure to acknowledge this diversity, particularly racial/ethnic diversity. Gender-inclusive citizenship has to be inclusive of women in their diversity.
I will return to the issue of diversity when offering the “half-empty” perspective, but first, inevitably perhaps as an outsider, moreover, a British outsider, I feel compelled to give the “half-full” account of progress in achieving gender-inclusive citizenship in the Nordic welfare states. I realise that the half-full/half-empty distinction is not exactly scientific. Nevertheless, it conveys the relative nature of judgements on the Nordic model from a gendered perspective.
The “half-full” analysis
In terms of women's overall position, as measured by the UN gender equality indices, the Nordic countries lead the world and they hold the top 5 places in the World Economic Forum gender gap index. The report on the latter observes that “it is a disturbing reality that no country has yet managed to eliminate the gender gap”. But “those that have succeeded best in narrowing the gap are the Nordic countries, with Sweden standing out as the most advanced in the world” (Lopez-Claros and Zahidi, 2005: 1). Women have advanced as political citizens in the formal public sphere to a greater extent than elsewhere, with a regional average of 40% parliamentary representation – more than double the rest of Europe (www.ip.org/wmn-e/world.htm).
The extent to which this has been the product of women organising “from below” in the feminist movement or from “within” the established political parties has varied between countries but either way, according to Karvonen and Selle the improvement in women's political representation “has changed the whole face of politics”. They continue “it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that the increased proportion of women in political life is the most important single change in Scandinavian social life in the post-war era” (Karvonen and Selle, 1995).
It is important not just as a marker of women's political citizenship but also because of its potential implications for policy, particularly the policies that underpin social citizenship. There is some disagreement in the literature as to the difference that women's political presence makes to policy. Female politicians do not necessarily promote “women-friendly” policies. However, many do and they are more likely to make a difference if women represent a critical mass in the political arena, which they do in the Nordic countries. Hege Skjeie wrote of Norway a decade ago that “within political life women now take an active part in creating those definitions of reality on which efforts to effect changes rest…Women's inclusion is perceived as having caused changes in party attitudes on a wide range of political issues” (Skjeie, 1993: 258).
Although in Sweden and Denmark important social rights such as childcare preceded the increase in women's formal political representation, childcare and other social policies today bear the mark of women's political agency from both below and within the formal political system. Indeed, in a study of women's claims making on childcare in Norden, Solveig Bergman suggests that it is this interplay between state feminism and autonomous women's organisations which “continues to characterize Nordic gender policies” (2004: 238).
It also therefore helps to shape women's social citizenship. Key here to the half-full analysis is the highly developed social infrastructure of services and leave provisions, which have contributed to women's increased economic independence through paid employment and low levels of poverty. According to Kari Melby, in her project report, economic independence “is probably the most important issue for women's empowerment and human dignity in the last century” (2006: 1).
Although Esping-Andersen's original welfare regime analysis focused on cash transfers, other scholars have argued that it is the infrastructure of services, which is key to understanding the distinctive Nordic welfare model, particularly from a gendered perspective. Arnlaug Leira writes that “state sponsoring of social care services served to maintain the form of institutional welfare state developed in Scandinavia and facilitated women's gainful employment” – both through provision of care services to support mothers' employment and as employers of female labour (2006: 31). However, I hadn't realised until reading Melby's report, that family policies and gender equality policies are not integrated in all the Nordic countries; Anette Borchorst writes of “Danish exceptionalism” in terms of the narrowness of its gender equality project (Borchorst, 2006).
Nevertheless, there are sufficient similarities among social care services in the Nordic countries (with the exception I believe of Iceland) to allow identification of what Arnlaug Leira terms “a ‘caring’ state” (2006: 30) and Anttonen and Sipilä a Nordic “social care regime” (1996), characterised by extensive provision of public care services for both children and frail older people in line with the value of universalism, even if, as Anneli Anttonen (2002) points out, the universalist trademark does not always fulfil its promise. She suggests that “we might argue that caring has become an acknowledged part of social citizenship in the Nordic countries. From the feminist point of view, a radical extension of social citizenship has taken place, and citizens have won the right to certain social care services; for example a comprehensive and universal municipal day-care system” (Antonnen, 2002: 76).
Important here from the perspective of gendered social citizenship (and also the rights of children) is the characterisation of child care as a citizenship right, most explicit in Finland but effectively realised in Denmark and Sweden also and aimed for in Norway, according to Leira (2006).
As well as, for the most part, being in the vanguard of developing childcare provisions to support an emergent dual-earner model, the Nordic welfare states have pioneered new parental leave arrangements to enable parents (not just mothers) to look after very young children at home. (I'll discuss the home care allowances introduced in Finland and Norway later.) Interestingly, the Nordic countries have not all followed the same model of parental leave in terms of the relationship between leave and public childcare provision. Nor is there a single position with regard to encouraging fathers' use of parental leave and involvement in childcare more generally.
This last issue is an element of the Nordic welfare model, which I have identified as particularly important for gendered citizenship in my own work (Lister, 1997/2003). For it represents recognition that men and women's access to citizenship rights and ability to act as citizens in the public sphere is differentially affected by their responsibilities in the private sphere. Women have been changing faster than men and their increased participation in the public sphere of the politics and the labour market has not been matched by men's increased participation in care work in the private, domestic sphere – which in a number of feminist accounts has been constructed as a citizenship responsibility in its own right equivalent to paid work. As far back as 1988, a Swedish Ministry of Labour sex equality document observed that “to make it possible for both men and women to combine parenthood and gainful employment, a new view of the male role and a radical challenge to the organisation of working life are called for” (1988: 5).
While I will discuss the limitations from the half-empty perspective, it is important to acknowledge the significance of what has been attempted. As Leira observes, “the schemes, and especially the father's quota, are remarkable as examples of state intervention not only in the general framework of employment, but also in the internal organization of the family. Everyday family life has been made into an arena for the promotion of gender equality” (2002: 85). The attempt to promote active fatherhood “by gentle force” is, Leira maintains, “an innovative and potentially radical approach to updating the gender contract” (ibid: 87).
Particularly striking here is Iceland, which tends to be left out of many accounts of the Nordic welfare state but which has not just a daddy month or two but three months. The father's quota has been most successful in increasing fathers' use of the leave there and in Norway (up to 80% and 90% respectively from tiny proportions); Johanna Lammi-Taskulu (2006) suggests this may be because it was added on to the existing parental leave period, whereas in other countries it involved some loss of the leave previously available to mothers.
From a British perspective it is this aspect of Nordic welfare and gender equality policy which is most striking, for although British politicians have now started to talk about active fatherhood and the government has indeed extended opportunities for paternity leave, they have been reluctant to intervene in the private, domestic sphere by actively promoting a more equal gendered division of care labour through measures such as the daddy month(s) of parental leave.
So, taking the range of social policies together, cross-national comparisons, such as Gornick and Meyers' (2003) study of policies to support employed parents and Daly and Rake's (2003) study of gender and the welfare state, tend to support the half-full analysis: the Nordic countries generally score well on most indicators of gender equality and gendered social citizenship. However, if one takes “gender equality” as one's benchmark rather than comparison with other industrialised societies, as does, for instance, the Swedish Political Platform for a Feminist Initiative, then the glass starts to look half-empty.
The half-empty analysis
Anette Borchorst observes that for all the achievements in embedding gender equality in public policies, the Nordic countries “are all characterized by noticeable gender equality paradoxes and policy inconsistencies. There is a discrepancy between intent and outcome and between the overall objectives and the actual position of women and men” (Borchorst, 2006).
This can be seen in the gender division of labour in both public and private spheres, the effects of which interact with each other so that on the one side gender divisions in the labour market affect decisions about who uses parental leave and home care allowances and on the other side, policies to help parents reconcile paid work and family responsibilities are seen by some as contributing to inequality in the labour market because it is still primarily mothers who make use of them. In other words, it is a vicious circle in which policies and practices reinforce each other to undermine the very commitment to gender equality, which frames those policies.
Despite women's educational achievements and increased labour market participation, they enter a labour market, which remains highly segregated both horizontally and vertically. Women are more likely to work in the public sector (where leave arrangements are more generous) and men in the private (where pay is on average higher); they are more likely to work reduced hours when children are young and are less likely to achieve top positions in the private sector. The degree of occupational segregation often comes as a surprise to outside observers who often assume that the commitment to gender equality will be reflected in greater labour market equality. That said, because these are relatively egalitarian societies overall, the gender pay inequalities that result from occupational segregation do not translate into such wide economic inequalities as segregated labour markets do elsewhere.
In the private, domestic sphere, where women still do the bulk of the caring work, two very different policy logics can be observed. On the one hand there is the gender-explicit policy logic of the “daddy leave” (in Norway, Sweden and Iceland) or extended paternity leave (in Finland, provided the father also takes the two last weeks of parental leave), in which the stated aim is to shift the gendered division of labour by encouraging men's greater participation in the care of young children. On the other hand, there is the supposedly gender neutral policy logic of child care allowances (again Finland and Norway), which are highly gendered in their effect. Here is an example of Danish exceptionalism, as it appears in neither list, having abandoned its short-lived “daddy leave” policy with the change of government.
Unfortunately, the embedded resistance of the gendered domestic division of labour to significant change means that the gender-neutral policies seem to have more of an impact in inadvertently reinforcing the gender division of labour than do the gender explicit policies in shifting it. It is overwhelmingly women who make use of home care allowances. The significance of this for gender equality and women's citizenship is disputed (see, for instance, Bergman, 2004). Some point to the temporary nature of the break from the labour market and the value to those mothers who would otherwise be unemployed (see, for instance, Salmi, 2006).
Others, including the OECD (2005), argue that it harms women's longer term labour market position. Some feminist scholars interpret it as a “new familialism” and a difference-based model of citizenship in which difference spells unequal (Mahon, 2002). Morgan and Zippel conclude from a review of such schemes that “as currently structured [they] satisfy neither the advocates of difference or equality, in that they provide only a weak valuation of care while undermining women's place in employment” (2003: 77). They argue that superimposing such schemes “on highly gendered labour markets” simply reinforces “the current division of labor in the workforce and the home” (ibid.). This, according to the OECD, is particularly the case for “mothers with lower levels of education, who have worked in less skilled occupations [and who] are most likely to take these low-paid leaves, which may further marginalise them from the labour market” (OECD 2001: 33, cited in Mahon. 2002: 352). Thus, the policies can exacerbate class stratification.
Highly gendered labour markets, together with workplace cultures which emphasise male indispensability, also blunt the impact of the daddy month policies. Even in Norway and Iceland, where they are most successful, mothers still take more parental leave overall than fathers. According to Lammi-Taskula (2006), only in Iceland have the number of fathers taking parental leave and the length of leave taken by fathers been growing at the same time. Thus some conclude that the value of the policies lies more in what they symbolise – a belief in the importance of a more equitable division of labour and the role of public policy in achieving that – than in their impact on the actual division of labour.
Interestingly, while the Nordic governments (other than in Denmark) stand out in their willingness to treat the domestic division of labour as “a structural prob¬lem”, as Magdalena Andersson (2005: 176) describes it, they were generally slow to acknowledge issues of bodily integrity as matters of public citizenship requiring rights of protection – more so than in liberal welfare states like the UK. While this did change, thanks to feminist movements, a recent evaluation of the major reform package adopted by the Swedish government in the late 1990s to counteract male violence against women identifies significant shortcomings in its implementation. Karen Leander, of the Stockholm Centre for Public Health writes that the report and subsequent discussion have revealed “persistent resistance to the general “institutionalization” of efforts against men's violence against women and “struc¬tural obstacles to gender power-conscious work” (2006: 124).
However, according to Maria Eriksson, writing in Gender Research in Sweden 2005, male violence is more readily acknowledged in the immigrant population. In other words, male violence is racialized and, she argues, “gender equality and child-friendliness become ethnic and racialized markers” of Swedishness (2005: 28). Similarly in Denmark the political Right have adopted the rhetoric of gender equality as a means of framing, particularly Muslim, minorities as the Other. This brings me to my final point: the challenges to the Nordic model in general and the women-friendly state in particular created by immigration and multi-culturalism.
While the Nordic welfare states are said to belong to the same worlds of welfare and gender, they are to some extent responding to these challenges in different ways (Anttonen et al., 2007). In some accounts, immigration is presented as the answer to the demographic challenges facing the Nordic welfare states; at the same time in Denmark, at least, the immigration regime has become much more restrictive and the principle of universality of social rights has been breached for immigrants and refugees. However, despite the Danish exceptionalism, she notes that “studies of lived citizenship of ethnic minority women have identified common problems in the relation between the Nordic gender equality norm, women's rights and multiculturalism” (2006).
Siim is one of a number of Nordic feminists who have for some years been drawing attention to how not all women fare equally in women-friendly states and, in the Danish context, she has pointed to new patterns of class polarisation and the need for new forms of gender solidarity able to embrace women of different ethnic and religious backgrounds (Siim, 2000). More recently, she – and others like Barbara Hobson and colleagues (Hobson et al., 2006) in Sweden – have argued the need for mechanisms that enable immigrant women to be full participating citizens so that their voices are heard in their own right rather than lost in translation when mediated by others (2006).
More generally, a number of commentators have been warning that diversity stands in tension with the values of solidarity and universalism that are so central to the Nordic model. This is a challenge that faces not just the Nordic welfare states but it is perhaps here that it stands in particularly sharp relief. Others, such as Peter Taylor-Gooby (2005), have argued that empirical analysis does not support the thesis that we have to choose between diversity and solidaristic welfare states.
Indeed, in a globalizing world it is possible to identify alternative, more inclusive, conceptualizations of solidarity, which go beyond the cross-class solidarity identi¬fied by Esping-Andersen as underpinning universalist welfare: for instance, a “cosmopolitan solidarity”, which, Ulrich Beck (2005: 140-1) argues, values diversity and “multiplicity” over “sameness and unity”, or what the American political theorist Jodie Dean calls “reflective solidarity”, appeals to which rest on “our awareness of and regard for those multiple interconnections in which differences emerge” (1996: 16). So perhaps one of the biggest challenges for the Nordic model is to develop new forms of gender-inclusive citizenship rooted in these cosmopolitan or reflective forms of solidarity.
This article is based on a paper presented at the Nordic Council of Ministers Conference on the Programme on Welfare Research, Oslo 11 May 2006.
Notes
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