Active social policy and women's political mobilization

This chapter focuses on female political mobilisation and active social policies, that is, active labour market policies and childcare services. The main argument is that women's collective agency is an important element for a more sophisticated interpretation of the potential differences between countries adhering to the same model of labour market policy. Public policies should not be perceived simply as the result of structures that constrain action and provide agents with the “rules of the game”. Policies may be shaped by collective agency as well. In this sense, women's political mobilisation may have influenced the policy-making process. Women are the largest, and the historically best organized, group of labour market outsiders, and as such they constitute the target population for which active social policies are designed. Hence it is interesting to see whether mobilisation has played a strategic role in the decision-making process regarding active social policies. Using the narrative technique and the reconstruction of events within the historical framework in question, the chapter shows how analysing women’s mobilization helps us to understand heterogeneity within labour market policy models.