Our disaggregated analysis of family policy developments since 2000 (Part Two of this
study) reveals new opportunities for path departure in all three countries, with political actors
(and policy entrepreneurs) (Cook 2007) and ideational shifts (Schmidt 2009) playing a major
role. Individual and group policy entrepreneurs in Poland, organizations of large families in
Poland and Hungary, and local government activists and middle class women in Romania
skillfully exploited domestic political channels and newly available international assistance from
the European Union to influence policy change in family allowances, childcare, and social
assistance. Still, Poland represents the only example of an attempted “paradigmatic” shift in
family policy across the board, dealing with several major program areas at once. Even there,
however, the proposed changes fall short of a dramatic overhaul of the core programs such as the
major cash transfers for the families and children. In all instances, the most powerful players
faced formidable obstacles in the form of institutional legacies of preexisting programs. The
most successful reforms such as the introduction of new benefits (tax credits) in all three
countries or recent expansion of kindergarten services (early education) in Poland and Romania
have taken place on the margins of national family policy. We suggest that only when family
policies become significantly less reliant on the historically most entrenched pillars of social
insurance, and in case of Romania and Hungary also equally well-consolidated employmentrelated
budgetary cash transfers such as family allowance and childcare leaves, and focus more
on non-traditional policy goals, now supported by the new middle classes, such as the well-being
of children and care opportunities for working mothers, we might witness significant cumulative
path departure. Finally, since 2000 we observe an accelerated merger of conservative, pronatalist
ideologies with a neoliberal emphasis on individual rights reserved primarily for working
families, emerging urban middle classes, and individual workingwomen across all three
countries but with varied intensity and effect. Poland serves as the best illustration of this trend;
followed by Romania. Hungary under the second Orbán cabinet exemplifies the lasting power of
traditional state paternalism, reinforced by the failure of previous social democratic and
neoliberal reforms. Finally, the continued salience of demography has bolstered the influence of
many pre-existing institutions and patterns of family policy across the post communist region,
with Hungary as the leading example, followed by Romania, and lastly by Poland where for the
first time ever population concerns elevated this category of social policies, targeting the young
rather than the elderly, to the very top of the national agenda.