Extended Summary

This study aims to examine the recent transformation of social policies in Türkiye concerning women’s unpaid domestic and care labor within a critical sociological and theoretical framework. In recent years, Türkiye’s welfare regime has displayed an intensified focus on familialism, where the unpaid care burden is increasingly assigned to the household and predominantly borne by women as a double burden. While traditional welfare studies often interpret such trends either as an outcome of cultural conservatism or as a structural deficiency in public service provision, this research suggests a more comprehensive analytical perspective. The primary argument of the article is that current familialist social policies may be conceptualized as an artificially constructed “familialist technology of power”. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and integrated with critical theoretical perspectives, this concept posits that state interventions do not merely reflect a passive absence of public care, but rather function as a proactive, strategic apparatus designed to regulate the population, female body, and domestic relations through moral, discourse-based, and institutional mechanisms.
To construct this conceptual framework, the study departs from Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s classic typology of welfare regimes, particularly engaging with the “Southern European” or “Mediterranean” model characterized by strong family reliance and low female labor force participation. However, the analysis argues that institutionalist approaches remain somewhat insufficient in explaining the specific political and ideological motivations behind Türkiye’s recent policy orientation. Therefore, the article synthesizes Esping-Andersen’s model with critical theoretical tools and Turkish feminist literature. Michel Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics” provides the foundation for understanding how modern power manages the biological life and reproductive capacity of the population. This perspective is further enriched by Jacques Donzelot’s concepts of the “policing of families” and the “tutelary complex,” which illustrate how social assistance and expert guidance transform the family into a micro-surveillance unit. Furthermore, Robert Castel’s thesis on the erosion of “social property” and the resulting “precaritization” helps explain how the retreat of state guarantees leaves individuals—especially lower-class women—vulnerable to economic instability. Nancy Fraser’s formulation of the “crisis of care” as a structural contradiction of financialized capitalism and Lucile Richard’s concept of “sovereign carelessness” are integrated to highlight how the state deliberately avoids public care provision while maintaining a pastoral discourse over the family unit.
Methodologically positioned within the qualitative research tradition, the article utilizes the document analysis technique to examine primary policy documents, legislative texts, official action plans, and government programs introduced or updated between 2020 and 2026. The empirical scope centers on seven specific policy interventions: (1) The “Vision Document and Action Plan for the Protection and Strengthening of the Family (2024–2028)” alongside the declaration of 2025 as the “Year of the Family,” which replaces rights-based female empowerment with family-centered biopolitical regulation; (2) The “Project for Supporting Young Couples Getting Married” (offering interest-free credit and dowry support), which acts as a biopolitical mechanism aligning financial aid with normative marriage and fertility goals; (3) The “Part-time Employment Regulation for Civil Servant Parents,” which shifts care responsibilities to the private sphere while potentially increasing women’s labor market fragility; (4) The “Digital Family” mobile application, which represents a modernized, internalized digital version of Donzelot’s tutelary complex; (5) “Conditional Cash Transfers” (CCTs), which operationalize Donzelot’s “negative pairing” by subjecting impoverished mothers to moral and behavioral conditionality; (6) The “Insufficiency of Public Daycare Services,” which reflects Richard’s “sovereign carelessness” by leaving care duties to women’s unpaid labor due to cost and ideological preferences; and (7) The “Three-Child Support Package,” which treats female fertility as a strategic instrument for state demographic targets.
The findings of the study indicate that Türkiye’s current care regime appears to be transitioning toward a form of “proactive familialism”. Rather than merely supporting the family as a passive welfare provider, the state actively intervenes in the domestic sphere through micro-regulatory and normative tools to ensure that the household remains the primary provider of welfare. This process is reinforced by a discourse that re-codes caregiving as a “sacred duty” or “maternal sacrifice,” a mechanism that Serpil Sancar connects to the maintenance of patriarchal family structures. Consequently, the retreat of public social property and the lack of universal daycare services do not appear as accidental policy gaps, but rather as components of a deliberate biopolitical management technique. This strategy disproportionately impacts lower-class women, who lack the financial means to purchase private care services, thereby deepening time poverty and class-based inequalities among women. Ultimately, this article suggests that understanding Türkiye’s care regime requires looking beyond the binary of market versus state, recognizing how moral glorification of the family serves concrete political and demographic functions. Achieving genuine gender equality and establishing care as a universal social right depend on rendering visible the ideological and structural mechanisms embedded within this familialist technology of power.