Adaptation to paternal leave policies in Finnish municipalities: changing gender norms and cross-border policy legacies

Countries with stronger support to gender equality tend to invest in policies supportingthe dual-earner family model or the earner/carer family model, while countrieswith stronger support to conservative gender norms tend to have policies supportingthe male breadwinner family model. However, gender equality norms can beendorsed by the majority of the population at the national level, whilst conservativenorms could still be largely supported at the sub-national level, potentially leadingto lower uptake of parental leave among fathers in more conservative areas.This study seeks to examine shifting norms in fathers’ parental leave uptakein Finnish municipalities in the 2010s, around the first reform that gave fathersan independent right to a 6-week quota of “solo” parental leave. We applied aBayesian spatio-temporal model on administrative data from Finnish municipalitiesand estimated local norms based on voting data and content analysis of politicalmanifestos. Furthermore, we used the proportion of Swedish residents as a proxyfor cross-border policy influences from the neighbouring country Sweden, wherepaternal leave-taking has been a longer phenomenon.Local support to de-familialising policies was found to predict higher leavetaking,but only before the 2013 reform when fathers’ quota use shortened mothers’leave. The proportion of Swedish-speaking residents was found to be increasinglyimportant for predicting paternal leave-taking. We interpret this result as a sign ofcross-border influences from Sweden. Interestingly, uptake increased the fastest inthe most conservative region, probably due to its strong linguistic and cultural linksto Sweden. Furthermore, we observed spatial dependencies between neighbouringmunicipalities, which supports our spillover hypothesis; that the interactions amongfamilies nearby lead them to adopt new practices.These results trigger new theoretical considerations concerning the role of gendernorms in affecting citizens’ behaviour in the family policy field and how these normsinteract with policy reforms, the role of national institutions in affecting welfare statepreferences at the local level, and the importance of community socialisation.