Measuring state de-familialism: Contesting post-socialist exceptionalism.

This article offers a methodology to reveal the latent constructs which underlie policies on parental leave and childcare services. It is constructed to uncover the state assumptions about social organisation of childcare and gender roles in a country-comparative perspective. Legal regulations are central to this analysis, and combinations of policy components take centre stage. An index of state de-familialism is proposed and its analytical potential tested on eight post-socialist EU states. Grounded in Leitner’s (2003) conceptualisation of familialism, it gauges three policy types: (1) Slovenian and Lithuanian supported defamilialism incentivises women’s continuous employment and active fatherhood, (2) explicit familialism in Hungary, Czech Republic, and Estonia supports familial childcare and reinforces gendered parenting, and (3) implicit familialism in Poland, Slovakia, and Latvia leaves parents without public support. These groups share core characteristics with developed welfare-state regimes. This methodology has the potential to discredit claims of post-socialist exceptionalism and allows researchers to test new hypotheses.