Suchergebnisse

The year 2020 was supposed to become a year of new parliamentary dynamics, given that the national elections in autumn 2019 had produced the largest shifts in the composition of Parliament for decades, most notably much higher shares of green and female MPs. However, in the first half of the year, party politics was put on hold when the Federal Council, in March 2020, and for the first time in its history, declared the 'extraordinary situation' under the Federal Law of Epidemics. While in June this situation was downgraded to the 'special situation' and Parliament and party politics regained relevance and visibility in the second half of the year, the pandemic clearly dominated many aspects of the political life in 2020.

This article evaluates the influence of welfare state policy on individual social volunteering. Unlike previous studies that have investigated the relationship between the welfare state and civic engagement, this contribution focuses on those areas of civil society that are most directly related to public welfare state activities. Moreover, it is assumed that welfare state policy does not uniformly affect the civic engagement of various social groups. The analyses provide support for the crowding out hypothesis: individual social volunteering is lower in extensive welfare states than it is in countries that spend less on welfare state policy. However, when group-specific welfare state effects are modelled, it is revealed that the crowding out effect of public social services does not hold for the low-income group. Additionally, extensive welfare policy reduces the negative effect of low affluence on social volunteering. Crowding out and crowding in thus go hand in hand: while state activities indeed serve as a substitute for social volunteering in some places, in others they are found to have a stimulating effect.

This article investigates whether and how family policy influences the probability and intensity of mothers' labor market participation. Unlike previous studies, this contribution focuses on group-specific policy effects, thereby accounting for the fact that, theoretically, women with different resources and preferences should respond differently to given policy measures. The analyses show that varying individual characteristics indeed influence the impact family policy measures have on women's individual behavior. First and foremost, family policies most strongly influence mothers with medium levels of education, for whom labor market participation tends to be "optional." Moreover, high direct and indirect cash benefits to families, which primarily stem from traditional conservative family policy, reduce the probability of employment for women with low to medium levels of education. Adapted from the source document.