Institutions, constitutions, actor strategies, and ideas: Explaining variation in paid parental leave policies in Canada and the United States
* Assistant professor, Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. Financial support for this research was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant #752-94-2271, as well as by the J. William Fulbright Scholar Program. The author gratefully acknowledges the support of William Gormley Jr., Kent Weaver, and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, as well as the helpful research assistance of Caitlin Cavanagh Halferty and Wendy Hicks-Casey. The author also thanks all of the interviewees who gave generously of their time in the researching of this article. E-mail: lwhite{at}chass.utoronto.ca
This article analyzes the reasons for cross-national differences in the legal and policy regimes related to maternity and parental leave in Canada and the United States. It explores why the Canadian federal government implemented a paid maternity leave policy much earlier than the U.S. It also explores why the U.S. had no national parental leave provisions before 1993 and why it does not have national paid leave provisions now. The article weighs the impact of institutional, constitutional, agential, and ideational/normative factors to explain policy differences in the two countries. While key institutional structures, such as federalism, and key court decisions have shaped maternity and parental leave policies substantially in the two countries, an important part of the explanation for the cross-national differences lies with how interests mobilize in response to past policy actions and legal norms and traditions.
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