ABSTRACT
With the exception of the United States, most wealthy nations provide family benefits to citizens, and often to non-citizen residents, with children. These benefits usually include family allowances, housing subsidies, tax breaks for dependent children, and paid family leave, to name some of the most important. Those excluded from eligibility are most often non-citizen immigrants; thus, research on exclusion from social programs often tends to focus on immigrant groups (e.g., Castles and Miller 1998). In some instances, however, citizens have been excluded from family-related social programs. Focusing on the cases of France and Israel, this paper explores how certain groups of citizens came to be excluded from family benefits and only recently, in the 1990s, gained access to these benefits. I argue that the citizens of France’s Overseas Departments and the Arab citizens of Israel were originally denied access to certain family benefits because of the pronatalist agenda behind these programs. I then examine how and why these groups eventually gained access to pronatalist-inspired family benefits. Exploring the development of family benefits in these two countries illuminates questions of nation and citizenship, specifically the often hazy distinction between citizenship in the state (based on participation in a political community) and membership in “the nation” (which often entails belonging to a specific ethno-national group). It also draws attention to the uneasy relationship between pronatalism as an ideology and the actual policies that have been enacted to address pronatalist goals.
