The politics of choice in a world
made of households
Susan Himmelweit and Jerome de Henau
Open University, UK
s.f.himmelweit@open.ac.uk
j.de-henau@open.ac.uk
IAFFE annual conference, 22-24 July 2010, Buenos Aires
Choice
• Increasingly called on as a political value by policy
makers
– throughout Europe
– examples mainly from UK
• Choice is supposed to:
– Be what everyone wants
• But isn’t achieved by public services
– Promote active citizen/consumers
• Co-production
– Rescue enabling policies from the dead hand of a bureaucratic
state
• “nanny state” modern term for “paternalism”!
• politics of “nudge”
– Deliver the benefits of the market:
• Value for money
• Innovation/competition to improve quality
Rhetoric of choice is used (UK)
• To justify privatisation of public services
– Initially through competitive tendering by state
agencies
• Delivers efficiency benefits of the market
• Political choice exercised in local elections (highly
constrained in practice)
– Increasingly through individual budgets,
personalisation
• Recipient chooses, most efficient
• Cuts out wasteful spending
• To justify flexible labour market
– Said to be easier to “hire and fire” than in other EU
countries
– UK individual opt out from European labour
regulations
“Choice” is sometimes used (UK)
• With respect to welfare spending
– Paid parental leave
– Tax credits/childcare subsidies
– But often in one direction rather than the
other:
• e.g. different policies promoted as giving
parents/mothers the choice:
– to continue in employment
– or to stay at home when their children are small
– And not generally where its exercise could
impose higher costs on the state
Economic arguments
• “Free to choose” – unregulated markets promote
individual freedom and dynamic efficiency
– Value for money
– Innovation and high quality
– Requires competitive markets
• Welfare theorems – under strict conditions
– a competitive market equilibrium is Pareto-optimal
– All Pareto-optima can be reached through the market
from some initial allocation
– Strict conditions include not only competitive markets
but:
• No externalities i.e. that all impacts of a decision are on the
decision maker alone
Who gets to choose?
• In practice, policy makers have had to construct
a decision-making subject for each policy
– Household/ family unit
– Particular individuals with the family
– Not always consistent
• Next few slides give some UK examples
Personal care services
• Decisions should made by the service recipients
– This is the logic of personalisation for elder/disabled
care
– In practice it is often relatives (and sometimes
professionals) who decide, who may have
• different motives
• even greater information problems e.g. about quality
– Budget is often not carer blind
• Inherent externalities
Working time regulations
• UK opt out allows employers and employees to make individuals
agreement to work long hours than regulations allow
– weak safeguards against coercion e.g. making such an agreement not
allowed to be a condition of employment
– seen as widely flaunted in practice
• Opt-out justified by giving individual employees the right to choose
their hours of employment
• Feminists have criticised notion of choice where there are shared
caring responsibilities
– Man’s choice is woman’s constraint
– Inherent externalities
• Working time highly skewed by gender in UK
– men with children work very long hours
– majority of women with children work part-time
• Government argued this was evidence of families having “chosen” a
particular division of labour
Maternity/paternity leave
• Paid maternity leave now 9 months
– Funded by state
– at very low fixed rate of pay (except for fist six weeks earnings
related)
• Fathers get
– Two weeks paid at same very low fixed rate
– Additional paternity leave of any time after six months that the
mother doesn’t take
• Mother chooses first; father can then choose
• Legislated externalities
• Justified as giving mothers the right to choose to stay in
employment after the birth of a child, and if mothers
want, fathers the right to participate in the care of that
child
Tax credits
• 1997 Labour government introduced tax credits for
working families (WFTC)
– Initially planned to be paid in wage packet (therefore
more likely to go to the man)
– Replaced smaller payments previously made to the
mother
– After feminist objections, couples were given the right
to choose who received WFTC
– Feminists pointed out that it was in those couples that
couldn’t reach agreement that it was most important
for women to have an income of their own
Current system “new” tax credits
• Working tax credit (WTC) paid to one wage earner
• Includes childcare subsidies, if both parents are in
employment, paid to “main carer”
• Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments also paid to main carer
• Main carer is new construct
– couple has to decide who that is, but meant to reflect actual
practice
– implies a particular view of child rearing
•
No “main wage earner” but means testing make
incentives different for first and second earners (couples
can choose which of two workers is paid WTC)
• Aim: reduce workless households
– By providing incentive for one parent to take employment
– Ambivalent about other parent – sometimes justified as enabling
mother to stay at home, at other time enabling women to work
No consistency in how subject of
choice is constructed
• Personalisation: Care recipients or their
families???)
• Working time: employees (but not their partners)
or is it families?
• Parental leave: mothers first (to return to work)
and fathers only if mothers want
• Tax Credits: couples, and within them first
earners and “the main carer”, with policy
targeted on household behaviour
Fluid specification of subject
• According to policy makers’ objectives
– Sometimes individuals: often ignoring that effects on others in
their households create
– At other times collectivities: households, families, parents,
assuming unity
• Either way externalities within households are either
ignored or assumed away
• This leads to interests of subject being constructed as
short-term rather than following from an individual life
course perspective
• Suspicion that “choice” has become a flexible rhetoric to
to justify policies introduced for other objectives
Feminists (on choice)
• Also value choice, particularly in contexts where women
have traditionally lacked it eg:
– “a woman’s right to choose”
– financial autonomy for women.
• But recognise that the process of choice is not one of
simple maximisation under constraints, which
– relies on unjustifiable separation of preferences from constraints
– fails to take account of changing social norms
• Recognition of influence of gendered social norms lead
feminists to question:
– whether what individuals “choose” is necessarily in their own
best interest
– even more so within the family where individuals vary in
• how far they distinguish their own interests from those of their family
• Power to influence collective decisions
• Will use the results of our research to investigate this
Same regressions as previous
paper
• Answers to questions on satisfaction with household
income may throw light on:
– what individuals would choose
– how well households choices reflect their interests
• Interested in correlates of satisfaction with household
income of men and women who have same household
income
• If satisfaction of each correlated to different extent with
various factors may be because those factors affect
access to that income
• Control for many other possible interpretation by using
fixed effects and controlling for overall satisfaction
• Do not know direction of causation
In general
• Everything else equal, within couples individuals’
satisfaction with their household income is more
correlated with the man’s than the woman's
–
–
–
–
–
Full-time employment (+ve)
Unemployment (-ve)
Being out of labour market (-ve)
Disability (-ve)
Hours of housework (-ve)
• Rather traditional gendered views, that may reflect:
– Recognition of external constraints?
– Gender norms?
• If this reflects what really benefits household income
then greater overall household resources go with
traditional gender roles
But
• Everything else equal, individuals’ satisfaction with their
household income is more correlated with their own than
their partner's:
–
–
–
–
–
Full-time employment (+ve)
Unemployment (-ve)
Being out of labour market (-ve)
Disability (-ve)
Hours of housework (-ve)
• Same factors as before
• If this reflects differential access to household income
then factors characteristic of traditionally male role in
household go with great access to household resources
• Illustration that division of labour that is most efficient (or
seen as most efficient?) in increasing total household
resources may advantage one partner in access to the
fruits of those household resources (Sen, 1990)
• For men there is no conflict: their full-time employment
(for example) rather than their partner’s is correlated
with:
– Greater (perceived) overall household resources
– Greater share for themselves
• For women there is conflict; their full-time employment
rather than their partner’s is correlated with:
– Lesser (perceived) overall household resources
– Greater share for themselves
• So immediate household resources may be (perceived
as) increased by reinforcing gender inequalities within
and beyond the household
Implications
• It matters who is given “choice”. For example, giving
couples ‘choice’:
– is not the same as giving individuals choice
– may result in choices that are in the (perceived) short-term
interests of the couple and favour the man’s access to
household resources
– may be against women’s long-term interests and autonomy
• In practice, decisions in accord with perceived immediate
household interests can have deleterious long-term
consequences for women
• Choices made by households are part of the way in
which gender inequalities are reproduced within and
beyond households
• Need to be very careful about to whom choice is given
But this is not enough
• To challenge gender inequalities and break
cycle need to loosen the economic constraints
and/or gender norms giving rise to such choices
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