Demographic and family policies in three post-communist countries

A seminar dedicated to demographic and family policy in three post-communist countries was held at the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research on May 23, 2022.

Linda Cook (Brown University, USA), Elena Yarskaya-Smirnova (HSE) and Vladimir Kozlov (HSE) presented their article "Demographic and family policies in three post-communist countries". The authors compare the "flagship" pronatalist programs adopted in the early 2000s in Russia, Poland and Hungary to increase the birth rate, as well as support families with children. It was found that these programs had the most significant and incommensurable impact on child poverty due to their different design. In addition, the provision of preschool child care and parental leave with the employment levels of mothers in different cases was investigated. The authors concluded that there are persistent differences in the level of employment of mothers in all cases, regardless of politics, while the majority of mothers in all three cases work, despite the dominant neo-familialist discourses.

The discussants of the article were Ekaterina Borozdina (European University in St. Petersburg) and Kerem Gabriel Oktem (University of Bremen, Germany)

Ekaterina Borozdina read the article from a sociological point of view. She noted that important accents on inequality and women's labor participation should be made more consistent throughout the article. Meanwhile, it would also be important to study how regimes use ideologies to legitimize social policy programs and how they use these social policy measures themselves to self-legitimize.

Kerem Gabriel Oktem explores the problems of family and demographic policy in the countries of Central Europe. From his point of view, the text raises several important issues that can be grouped into two big problems and in fact point potentially to two independent articles: first, about the impact of the pro-natalist policy on the growth of fertility, and secondly, the impact of family policy on women's labor participation, while it would be interesting to consider separately measures related to child support, and measures addressed to parents, and see regional variations of their effects. It would be useful to put the questions posed in the article in a broader perspective of the literature on family policy, and focusing not only on post-socialist countries, but more general, theoretical considerations.