Ideas, Coalition Magnets and Policy Change: Comparing variation in early childhood education and care policy expansion across four latecomer countries

This article compares work-family policy expansion in four latecomer reformers: Germany, England, South Korea, and Japan. It focuses on the role of ideas as coalition magnets in explaining the more comprehensive and sustained policy shifts in Germany and Korea. We highlight how top-down polysemic problem definitions enabled policymakers in Germany and Korea to forge lasting consensus for reform, while such unifying ideas were lacking in England and Japan. Through examining how and under what circumstances coalition magnets form, this article makes contributions both to the literature on work-family policy reform but also more broadly on the theorization of coalition magnets in political processes of reform