You are warmly invited to a seminar with Mikael Goossen and Erika Willander, at the Department of Sociology.
Social division and political polarization of attitudes toward equal sharing of parental leave. An analysis of 26 OECD countries
Abstract
A common strategy to gauge a society’s propensity for change in a gender equal direction is to study attitudinal differences between social categories. However, this approach relies on the underresearched assumption that such social divisions are indictive of the political conflict needed for political change. In this paper I test this proposition by relating social divisions within 26 OECD countries to political polarization for the issue of shared parental leave. The reason for studying shared parental leave is that this issue is firmly placed within the realm of politics and policy—and so its potential politicization has clear implications for the propensity for change—while reserved leave for fathers has been coupled with a range of concrete beneficial outcomes related to men’s increased involvement with their families. Overall, I found positive associations between support for equal sharing of parental leave and the degree of political polarization for the same, and, furthermore, that the magnitude of the social divisions was indicative of the degree of the political polarization. The results were similar for different operationalizations of political polarization, and robust to the potential influence outliers as well as confounders related to modernization and gender equality.