For several decades, welfare states have been in continuous change, driven by scarcity of resources and a crumbling gender order as only two of many underlying causes. The German and the Swedish welfare states constitute interesting cases in this context because they represent two different regime types in mainstream- and gendered welfare research. Especially the reforms in German family policy have been debated with regard to what extent they have led to a true shift towards a more egalitarian gender model. This paper scrutinizes the German and the Swedish welfare system through the lens of single mothers´ social citizenship rights.
In my analysis I use type cases to analyze social benefits for mothers in the two countries. I constructed four types of beneficiaries in each country, each being a single mother of two children, representing different positions inside- and outside the labor market. I analyze the benefits they receive when on parental leave: parental insurance, child allowance, housing allowance and social assistance. The empirical results show that in sum, the differences in how much the type cases receive in the two countries are very small.
I argue that this lack of difference in the distribution of social benefits is at odds with the image of these two welfare states as distinctly different regimes, and can only partly be explained by actual recent reforms in those states. I argue for an alternative explanation: that the exaggerated difference between the German and the Swedish welfare state in welfare research is an effect of the vague definition of universality. I argue that we have to further qualify this very broad idea, and present a possible separation of “upwards universality” versus “downwards universality”, giving a more distinct picture of who is included and excluded in the notion of universal social citizenship.
