Margarita Estévez-Abe

Gendering the Varieties of Capitalism: A Study of Occupational Segregation by Sex in Advanced Industrial Societies

This article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems. It develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women. The central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation. The article finds that coordinated market economies, because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments, are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies. The empirical section provides cross-sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries.

Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan: Party, Bureaucracy, and Business

This book explains how postwar Japan managed to achieve a highly egalitarian form of capitalism despite meager social spending. Margarita Estévez-Abe develops an institutional, rational-choice model to solve this puzzle. She shows how Japan’s electoral system generated incentives that led political actors to protect, if only for their own self-interested reasons, various groups that lost out in market competition. She explains how Japan’s postwar welfare state relied on various alternatives to orthodox social spending programs. The initial postwar success of Japan’s political economy has given way to periods of crisis and reform. This book follows this story to the present day. Estévez-Abe shows how the current electoral system renders obsolete the old form of social protection. She argues that Japan’s institutions now resemble those of Britain, and she predicts that Japan’s welfare system will also come to resemble Britain’s system. Japan thus faces a future in which its society is more market oriented and more economically stratified.

Beyond familialism: Recalibrating family, state and market in Southern Europe and East Asia

This Special Issue takes on a new cross-regional comparison between Southern Europe and East Asia in an attempt to identify ‘new politics’ of welfare state adjustments. Departing from the previous literature that overemphasized regional peculiarities of East Asian and Southern European welfare states, our Special Issue highlights family resemblances – among Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain. We argue that these four welfare states – often labelled as ‘familialist’ – share key common characteristics, which in turn experienced very similar policy problems in recent years. Interestingly, despite their initial similarities, these four countries have been trying to cope with new policy problems in different ways. In this process, some are clearly becoming less familialist. The main aim of this introductory article is to demonstrate the theoretical advantages based on the new cross-regional comparison. This article proceeds in three steps. First, it establishes the usefulness of the concept of family resemblances in our cross-regional comparison. Second, it presents a brief historical account of recent policy differences across the four countries going beyond familialism and shows that the existing theories fail to account for the new divergences. Third, it provides the overview of the Special Issue by explaining the research puzzles each paper tackles. We argue that these four welfare states, which are moving beyond familialism to varying degrees, represent heuristically helpful cases to explore the effects of both domestic and international political factors.

An International Comparison of Institutional Requisites for Gender Equality

A quarter-century has passed since the enactment of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act in 1985, but the economic status of Japanese women remains well below average as compared with women in other developed nations. This article conducts an international comparison to examine the problems with the employment environment for women in Japan and the efforts taken to address them.

Politics of defamilialization: A comparison of Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain

This article investigates the politics of ‘defamilialization of care’ in four familialist countries – Italy, Japan, Korea and Spain – during the past 15 years. By ‘defamilialization of care’, we refer to those public policies, which aim at reducing the care responsibility of the family – both for the young and the old. We build upon the existing literature on new social risks by highlighting the role of those macro-political institutions such as electoral systems and government types in order to demonstrate that there are two very different types of politics of defamilialization: (1) election-oriented and (2) problem-oriented. We attribute different policy outcomes in the four familialist countries to their specific institutional configurations rather than to partisan government composition or different cultural orientations.