Comparative Perspectives on Childcare Expansion in Germany: Explaining the Persistent East-West Divide

Germany's family policy responded to the European Union's Barcelona targets by expanding publicly funded childcare, especially for children under the age of three, throughout the country. While overall nearly 33 per cent of all children in that age group had access to public childcare by 2015, there is still a large difference between the situation in the eastern and the western part of the country. This paper documents and explains this development of two persistently different childcare regimes in the two parts of the country. It shows that supply factors such as local administrative capacity and resources interact with demand factors such as parental need and demands for public childcare to produce the divergent development. It then discusses the conceptual challenges involved in engaging in this type of subnationally comparative analysis.