Incorporating ‘Class’ into Work-Family Arrangements: Insights from and for Three Worlds

In response to feminist critics, Esping-Andersen (1999) added family to the state-market nexus by examining the degree of familialism across regimes. In the absence of the state de-familializing care, however, it is difficult to predict work-family arrangements without reference to the overall level of inequality and a family’s social location within it. Thus, levels of familialism interact with levels of economic inequality. I build on existing categorizations of how two-parent families combine work and care in European countries by adding an explicit consideration of how these patterns vary within countries by education. I utilize hierarchical clustering with data for 16 countries (2004-2010) from the Luxembourg Income Study and the European Social Survey. In some respects, refining country averages by education lends greater support to the tenets of Three Worlds, but also reveals a Southern European pattern distinguished by inequality in work-family arrangements more characteristic of liberal regimes. Findings also illustrate how countries that polarize between dual full-time and male breadwinner families largely polarize by education.