The Rise of Childcare-Related Cash Schemes in South Korea: Structural-Functionalist, Institutional, Political, and Ideational Dynamics

South Korea has become a frontrunner in twenty-first-century family policy expansion. While initially concentrated on childcare services, cash benefits—especially those given as an alternative to public childcare services—have increasingly moved to the center of the country’s family policy portfolio. Outlining and integrating the structural-functionalist, institutional, political, and ideational approaches, this article traces three distinctive processes of childcare-related cash reforms chronologically: the policy’s limited inception in the late 2000s, its extension to cover all income and preschool age groups in the early 2010s, and its further generous expansion to young children in the early 2020s. A key recurring pattern was observed during the reform: dwindling national productivity driven by low childbirth and stagnant female employment, coupled with an institutional gap in the service-focused childcare system, opened a discursive space for political actors to promote childcare-related cash in electoral politics and justify it with reference to widely accepted normative values.