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Cassandra EngemanResearch fellow

About me

Cassandra Engeman writes on issues related to work, social movements, and comparative social policy. Her current research examines how political regimes, trade unions, and women in politics influence parental leave provisions and the timing of leave policy adoption across countries with a special focus on fathers’ leave rights and provisions. She is also working with colleagues on a longitudinal study of the consequences of protest for environmental policy in Sweden and a study of relationships between public policies and work-family reconciliation during the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. and cross-nationally. She recently published an article in Social Forces and a chapter on U.S. state-level family policy development in the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of Family Policy. For more information, visit: www.cassandraengeman.com.

Research projects

Encouraging Fathers’ Care

Encouraging Fathers’ Care: Causes and Consequences of Fathers’ Parental Leave Provisions in Cross-National Comparative Perspective

A father holding an infant
Sustainable synergies

A comparative perspective on Swedish social policy to develop inclusive programmes for an extended working life

stacks of gray pebbles
Can social policy change behavior?

This project has three aims: to assess gendered trends in leave provisions across 31 countries since 1965, examine links between leave policies and gendered use using Eurostat Labour Force Survey data (2010, 2018), and explore how long-term exposure to leave rights influences mothers’ and fathers’ leave use.

Baby and father on the floor
Making Time:: Organized Labour and the Politics of Care Leave

Care leave – the right to take time-off from work to provide care – is a key ingredient for sustainable work and a rare area of welfare state expansion. As women now make-up a majority or near majority of union members in many countries, this project examines when and how trade unions mobilize for care leave policies and to what effect.

Research

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • ’Job-Killer’ Bills in Tough Economic Times

    2018. Cassandra Engeman. Mobilization 23 (3), 329-347

    Article

    How do economic conditions influence social movements’ capacity to set legislative agendas? This research examines multiple efforts to expand family, medical, and sick leave policies in California across almost two decades spanning the Great Recession. Longitudinalanalysis in a state with political conditions favorable to leave policy agendas permits close consideration of how varying economic conditions shape social movement influence in the policy process. Drawing from various qualitative sources, this research finds that, after the recession, leave bills were more often held in appropriations committees for their estimated costs to the state and anticipated pressures on funding sources. Weak economic conditions also shifted leave advocates’ priorities away from leave policy issuestoward maintaining public employment and services. The articleadvances social movement research by showing the mechanisms by which state fiscal capacity shapes social movement strategies and interacts with political conditions at the early, agenda-setting stages of the legislative process.

    Read more about ’Job-Killer’ Bills in Tough Economic Times

Show all publications by Cassandra Engeman at Stockholm University

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