The Caseload Economy: How Social Funding Structures in the EU and U.S. Incentivize Family Law Caseload and Complexity Expansion

This paper offers a novel comparative analysis of how supranational social funding structures influence institutional behavior in family law systems, focusing on Title IV-D of the U.S. Social Security Act and the European Union’s European Social Fund Plus (ESF+). While prior critiques often examine these systems in isolation, this study bridges American and European contexts to reveal a shared incentive logic: both frameworks reward sustained case management over resolution by tying funding to quantifiable need and bureaucratic activity. In the U.S., Title IV-D monetizes child support enforcement through direct performance-based reimbursements, incentivizing caseload expansion and prolonged legal entanglement. In the EU, ESF+ funding is competitively awarded through Operational Programmes that prioritize administrative sophistication and ongoing engagement with social issues—favoring countries like Denmark, which maintain complex family law infrastructures that serve as a proxy for low levels of deprivation. The result is an emergent “caseload economy,” where institutions become fiscally reliant on the visibility of social difficulty rather than its resolution. Drawing on comparative policy analysis and institutional theory, the paper argues that even high-capacity welfare states reproduce the same structural distortions as throughput-driven systems like Title IV-D—sustaining family conflict not as a policy failure, but as a fundable asset. Authored from Denmark, this work situates that dynamic within the broader political economy of social funding, where institutional relevance is preserved through persistent visibility rather than substantive outcomes.Author’s Note: This paper is authored from Copenhagen, Denmark, offering a U.S.-informed perspective grounded in the Danish and European social funding and family law context.