The seminar will be held in Swedish.
Opponent: Arvid Lindh from SOFI, Stockholm.
https://www.su.se/profiles/arb-1.191649
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Arvid_Lindh
Abstract
Across Europe, men are generally more negative and women are more positive toward an encompassing welfare state. The fact that women and men differ in their attitudes across social strata, even when comparing men and women with similar value priorities, implies that this gender gap is not only due to material inequalities or gender socialization. The aim of this dissertation is to increase our knowledge about this gender gap in welfare state attitudes. Above all, this thesis engages with the relationship between welfare state arrangements, gender relations and attitudes.
This thesis contributes by empirically demonstrating to what extent there are systematic variation in the gender gap in welfare state attitudes between countries, and how this connects with the aggregate gender division of unpaid labor and institutional variations in family policy. Moreover, it contributes by demonstrating what mechanism in terms of stratification, socialization and gender identity are relevant to explaining the gender gap in welfare state attitudes at the individual level. In addition, this thesis answers whether men’s and women’s attitudes in Sweden are converging or diverging over time. This dissertation also offers a theoretical contribution by putting institutional theory, modernization theory and social role theory in communication with each other. By combining political, sociological and psychological perspectives, this thesis opens up for a novel and more holistic understanding of the gender gap in welfare state attitudes.
I use a variety of survey-based methods in the different articles. Tailored to answer different specific questions and utilizing different perspectives, they contribute to the overall aim of increasing our knowledge about what contextual factors and individual-level mechanisms explain the gender gap in welfare state attitudes. To triangulate the relationship between institutional arrangements and the gender gap in attitudes I make use of both a comparative perspective, looking at differences between contexts at a single point in time, as well as a temporal perspective, studying development within a single country – Sweden – for the period 1981 to 2018. To investigate how specific mechanisms operate at the individual level I make use of cross-sectional studies of the Swedish population together with different regression based techniques – mediation and moderation analysis – that are designed to elicit either how gender operates through intermediates related to welfare state attitudes, or conversely is moderated by such factors in an interplay with the contextual environment.
