Gendering the Institutionalist Analysis of the Welfare State: Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom

Due to the intervention of feminist scholars, the gendered dimensions of welfare states have increasingly been recognized. In welfare state analysis there is now a clear understanding of the role of intersecting institutions in the structure of the welfare state, referred to as ‘welfare regimes’. Very importantly, feminists showed how different social policy systems enforce or weaken the ‘male-breadwinner principle’, which defines a gendered division of labour within the family (see for example Lewis 1992; Lewis and Ostner 1994; O’Connor et al. 1999; Sainsbury 1996). The contribution of feminist scholars has widened the scope of institutions considered significant in these regimes to include, for example, the gendered dynamics of the family and caring relationships, as well as the way in which these gender relations play out in other socio-economic spheres such as the labour market. In an unprecedented fashion, the significance of gender has become recognized and adopted by mainstream scholarship (Amenta 2003; Bussemaker and Van Kersbergen 1994; Esping-Andersen 1996, 1999; Pierson 2000b).