This paper analyses the implications that demographic and economic projections have on public pension spending in the European Union (EU). Using some stylised facts, we study the aging trends of the population, as well as labour force and employment projections. Indices of both demographic and economic dependence are built. All of this is used to determine the impact on public pension spending in the EU. Although we detect substantial heterogeneity of circumstances, we show that the states in which aging of the population weights more in explaining public pension expenditure growth as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are generally the ones that make greater efforts to control this spending. Given the limited capacity of policies to increase active population or employment to offset the effects of aging, measures aimed at diminishing the generosity of the public pension system and at promoting private schemes have gained relevance.

In this article we examine the processes driving the outsourcing of masculinized forms of domestic work, involving household and garden maintenance and repair, and its displacement to migrant men; a trend which we conceive as part of the broader transnationalization of care that has been highlighted in feminist scholarship. The article draws on two studies conducted in the United Kingdom and Germany, and focuses on the demand on the part of households buying in “male” domestic services. We find that households use handymen in order to alleviate a father time-bind, which is rooted in three processes. Firstly, a “Europeanization” in norms around childhood, parenting and fathering; secondly, a liberalization and flexibilization of working time regimes in both countries; and thirdly, path dependency in welfare regimes based historically on a male breadwinner model. On the basis of our findings in the United Kingdom and Germany, we conclude the paper by reflecting on whether and why we might expect the commoditization of male domestic services to be manifest in other European countries.

This paper argues that the concept of the liberal welfare state within welfare state regimes discourse fails to account for some important aspects of the historical development of liberalism. It is argued that two key aspects of liberalism have been neglected. First, that liberalism essentially arose in opposition to ascribed status, seeking to replace it with a form of “achieved” status. Second, that a major stream of historical liberalism sought to equalize individual opportunity by suggesting that the state should provide some basic social and economic supports to individuals in need. This paper uses OECD health data to identify welfare state clusters based on the measurement of welfare (rather than neo)liberalism. The emerging cluster model is then compared with other welfare state regime typologies with regard to its ability to predict important social and political outcomes. The paper concludes that the emerging “welfare-liberal” typology may be a better predictor of certain social and political outcomes than other regimes configurations, indicating the usefulness of considering alternative aspects of liberalism when examining welfare state regimes.

In 2008, the world underwent one of its worst economic and financial crises, whose consequences are still visible in some countries. This paper aims to analyse the impact of the crisis within the long-term care systems of Germany, England, Sweden and Spain from a comparative perspective. The time period analysed spans from the outset of the crisis in 2008, up to 2017. This article starts off from the thesis of the divergent impact of the economic crisis in these countries and the convergence between the impact of the crisis and long-term care contractions in the most afflicted countries. The outcome highlights the power of economic and financial pressures in order to explain the contractions within the care policies. Equally, it emphasizes the contradictions between the formal development level of the care systems and their practical institutional implementation in the field.

This themed section focuses on the political and social policy discourses of resurgent welfare chauvinism and identity politics in contemporary Europe. The populist radical right, in particular, has utilised these discourses to great effect, reframing social policy and social citizenship through a heady mix of arguments evoking the nation state and ethnicity, often contemporaneously. Although the explanations for the outcome of the referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, or Brexit, cannot be distilled to any single issue or cause, it is also impossible to deny the relevance of social policy to the outcome. For example, vote choice in the referendum was influenced by factors such as education levels and levels of labour market vulnerability (Hobolt, 2016), ultimately dovetailing with the well-known thesis about globalisation's ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (Kitschelt & McGann, 1995; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2007; Kriesi et al., 2012) and the structural failures of post-industrial economies to stop growing inequality.

This article examines the development of a ‘dualised’ welfare regime – generous earnings-related unemployment compensation for ‘insiders’ and residual needs-based social assistance provision for ‘outsiders’ – in China and Brazil, which experienced impressive economic development in recent decades. It argues that such a welfare outcome can partly be accounted for by the ongoing influence of ‘insiders’, which was conditional upon the pace and nature of economic liberalisation reforms and their representation in institutional channels of social policy-making. It also demonstrates that the new social/unemployment assistance schemes for ‘outsiders’ emerged due to both governments’ fear of losing their power in politics; yet, these schemes were designed in a residual way since ‘outsiders’ did not possess the same political resources as ‘insiders’ did. The paper, moreover, draws from the Russian experience (a negative case) to demonstrate that such a dualised welfare outcome did not take place because the ‘insiders’ were weak, owing to a radical and orthodox liberalisation and they did not have access to institutional venues to influence social policy-making process.

In a period of welfare state retrenchment, Australia's neo-liberal government is continuing to implement an expensive National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Australia is among the pioneers of welfare measures funded from general revenue. Until recently, however, attempts to establish national schemes of social insurance have failed. The paper reviews this history through the lenses of path dependence accounts. It then presents contrasting descriptions of the NDIS by its Chair, the politician who inspired him, and two feminist policy analysts from a carers’ organisation. Path dependence, these accounts illustrate, has been broken in some respects but consolidated in others. In particular, the dynamics of ‘managed’ capitalist markets, gendered notions of abstract individuals and organisations, and the related difficulties in accounting for unpaid labour are constraining the transformative potential of the NDIS.

Following significant electoral defeats in 2010, both the British Labour Party and the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) have been re-considering their approach to the welfare state. This article outlines some of the key themes of social democracy and social democratic social policy before discussing the evolution of the latter in both Sweden and Britain. The paper explores the cumulative effect of the revisionist approaches adopted by both parties over time which has resulted in a distancing from a welfare state strategy based on equality, universalism and publicly provided services. It is concluded that both parties now have little road left to construct a modern welfare state narrative that reflects “core” social democratic principles.

Many EU countries have been carrying out substantial state pension reforms since the mid-1990s. This article studies whether the reforms that were carried out in ten EU countries before and after the 2008 financial crisis are different. This is done through an analysis of the different elements of these reforms and also by comparing pension entitlements after each set of reforms. The main conclusion is that the pre-crisis reforms were much stronger and had a more negative impact on women than the post-crisis reforms. It is harder to determine whether this represents a temporary break in the reform process or a permanent change in the orientation of pension reforms in these ten countries.

Recognition of the significance of public wage employment programmes in tackling unpredictable community “covariate” shocks and ensuring livelihood security of the rural poor has led to the enactment of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, with state guarantee of work. Implementation of the Act, our empirical findings tell us, has become the site of tangible exchanges between state and society, with factors such as the level of material support for it, the balance of power between the local state and the poor on the ground, and the larger socio-economic structure determining programme outcomes.

This article explores work-care policy development in Western Balkans, focusing on a critical assessment of the potential of the European Union’s policy framework to (re)shape the policies adopted in Western Balkans and boost gender equality in employment and care. Two policy measures at the centre of the European agenda are in focus: parenting leaves and early childhood education and care. The EU’s employment-oriented policy framework has met underdeveloped childcare services network and mother-centred and stratifying leave policies in Western Balkans, providing ample space for improvements regarding gender imbalance in care and employment. While the EU policy framework may provide an important push factor towards introducing gender-equalising policies in Western Balkans, it can also bring minimum adjustments. The EU’s ambiguous work-care policy framework, weak legitimacy of gender equality agenda and weak fiscal capacities in Western Balkans, and uncertainties about EU membership prospects may hamper progress towards more inclusive and gender-equal work-care policies.

The various interventions that governments took in the first wave of the Covid-19 outbreak impacted people severely. Given the low satisfaction with the government performance in Austria compared to Denmark, though both governments set out with a suppression strategy early on and were able to lower infection rates, we analyse the changes in civil, political and social citizenship and the governmental communicative practices during the first Covid response phase from March to August 2020. Employing a case-oriented qualitative comparison, we find that a combination of factors explains the different degree of satisfaction. In Austria, there was a combination of politics of fear, extensive and authoritarian regulations of civil citizenship, political citizenship was challenged and social citizenship undermined. In Denmark, an engaging and caring communicative strategy was employed, political citizenship was maintained and civil citizenship was curtailed less obstructively and was less policed. Social citizenship also was upheld for larger groups.

Comparative analyses of welfare systems have largely proceeded on the basis that coherent nation-states exist. This assumption was always problematic – as many theorists have acknowledged – but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate, not least because of the increasing power of global cities that act as coordinating hubs for the global economy. Although residing in nation-states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy with often rather different economic, demographic and social contexts. While there is growing literature on global cities, what the rise of these cities means for social policy and for welfare states remains an underexplored issue. Here we outline some key issues the rise of global cities presents for welfare states before proceeding to illustrate both theoretical and practical issues we highlight through a case study of Mexico City.

To date, social long-term care insurance (SLTCI) systems have been introduced in six countries globally: the Netherlands, Israel, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg and South Korea. Applying an actor-centred, multi-dimensional framework and fuzzy-set analysis, the present article investigates the typical characteristics and variations of these SLTCI schemes at introduction and today. In short, we find that the SLTCI model features dominant social contribution financing, a mix of for- and non-profit providers, and state regulation. In light of the relevance of corporate self-regulation often associated with social insurance systems, the dominance of state regulation is unexpected. The analysis also reveals considerable variance between cases, most notably concerning the extent of private individual actors’ involvement. While geographical proximity of countries does not explain differences between SLTCI systems, “temporal clusters” seem to partly drive the variation of SLTCI actor configurations.

This article analyses how life course events including education, citizenship, marriage status and having children would affect female migrant labour market integration. This is put in terms of employment status and job quality under the perspective of welfare and production regimes. To investigate different institutional effects, countries representative of these regimes’ typologies, such as the UK and Ireland for liberal market economies/liberal welfare states, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for coordinated market economies (CME)/social democratic welfare states, alongside Germany and France for CME/conservative welfare states, were employed. European Social Survey data are adopted within a linear probability model, alongside a nested model aggregating life course events. Through these, migrant penalty is analysed regarding labour market outcomes with respect to natives. Among the life course events, education and citizenship acquisition showed a particularly strong impact on migrant penalty, while marriage and having a child did not significantly affect migrant penalty.

The share of the extreme poor living in fragile and conflict-affected situations is projected to rise above 50 per cent by 2030. There is consequently an acute need for poverty-reduction mechanisms such as social protection within these contexts, which requires the integration of the discourse and policies on fragility with those on social protection. This paper traces the development of the two agendas in the World Bank, through documentary analysis and 43 interviews with Bank staff. It explores the extent to which social protection is considered within the fragility agenda (and vice versa), to establish whether the building of social protection systems is included within the broader ambition of “state-building” and considers the barriers to further integration of these agendas. The paper concludes that interaction between them has been limited to date and highlights the Bank’s own institutional architecture as a barrier to a more integrated approach.

This article analyses whether the extent of public welfare provision influences the speed at which (quasi-)jobless households get (back) into employment. (Quasi-)joblessness is one of the key criteria defining the risk of poverty and social exclusion in the EU. Moreover, the perceived tension between the main functions of social benefits (protecting households from poverty and incentivising job search) is most acute among these households. Based on EU-SILC data, we examine changes of household work intensity during one year after benefit receipt. We observe that “more-generous” social benefits have a slightly negative impact. This can potentially be due to a disincentive effect of social benefits, but it can also mean that the additional financial leeway is used by job seekers to wait for more adequate job offers or engage in further training. Even though statistically significant, the estimated negative effects are very small.

This article aimed to explore the individual-level determinants of current and previous trade union memberships and to question if certain patterns are prevalent among European countries. Accordingly, repeated logit models across 15 European countries are applied drawing on the ninth round of the European Social Survey data. Variables are selected primarily considering the supply–demand theory, which explains the union membership based on the idea that employees are seeking to maximise the utility through cost and benefit analysis. In this context, this article offers a comprehensive analysis of the determinants of trade union membership with findings suggesting that personal, occupational and workplace characteristics affect current membership while occupational and workplace characteristics have effects with inverse directions on current membership and previous membership.