Party ideology and care policy: The decline of institutional care since 1950

This paper studies the role of government partisanship in the transformation of two uniquely old care policy areas: the care of people with chronic and severe mental illness, and of children who cannot be cared for by their parents. While nineteenth-century ‘insane asylums’ and ‘orphanages’ have widely been understood as institutions of social control, they also served a social care function, which during the era of deinstitutionalisation was replaced by alternative forms of care. Studying mental health and child welfare policy decisions in 12 advanced capitalist countries between 1950 and 2015, I show that the types of care policies that replaced large, custodial institutions varied with government partisanship. I argue that partisan policy choices reflected parties’ core policy preferences shaped by trade-offs between their redistributive goals and individualist or familial ideals, and the lasting ideological effects of very old societal cleavages. The study contributes to theoretical debates in comparative politics about the role of partisanship in social policy making and the dimensionality of party competition over time.