Despite the absence of an unemployment grant in South Africa, there is growing concern that other social assistance provision might nevertheless weaken work motivation and create a ‘dependency culture’. This study explores attitudes about the relationship between grant receipt and paid employment in South Africa. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, it examines whether there is evidence of a ‘dependency culture’, the nature and strength of labour market attachment among grant recipients, and the opportunities and barriers to employment they face.

We found that both those in and out of work placed a high value on paid employment. Joblessness had not become ‘normalised’, and all categories of the workless were extremely motivated to get work. Grant recipients did not subscribe to a distinctive culture but to mainstream values and aspirations. While some benefit claimants subscribed to popularly promoted prejudices about other social assistance claimants, our findings appear to counter recent concerns about potential unintended effects of the current grant system. The key factors in reducing people's chances of finding employment seem linked to the structural conditions of the labour market and the wider economy rather than the motivational characteristics of the unemployed and the arrangements of the grant system.

Provision of early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England is highly marketised. Since 2010, when the Labour Party lost power to a Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition, followed by a Conservative victory in 2015, there has been a strong austerity agenda. It is therefore surprising that ECEC has continued to be supported and expanded. However, we show that policies to address the three key issues of availability, affordability and quality have undergone significant incremental change in response to shifting emphases between the two main goals of increasing children's development and mothers' employment, together with a much firmer orientation towards the importance of growing the childcare market.

This article examines claims that social housing allocations policies can, on the one hand, contribute to and on the other, counter, social exclusion. In setting the scene, the paper investigates connections between housing processes and social exclusion and describes the development of social housing allocations systems over the past few decades. Drawing on evidence from two recently completed national studies in England and Scotland it shows that allocation policies contribute to social exclusion in three main ways. First, a large proportion of social landlords restrict eligibility for social housing thereby contributing directly to exclusion. Second, mechanisms within allocation systems continue to segregate the most excluded to the worst residential areas. Third, through the 1990s allocation policies became increasingly coercive, so reducing or eliminating tenant choice over their own housing in distinct contrast to the choice that is available in the private market. The paper then reviews the dilemmas faced by policy-makers: whilst aspects of allocations contribute to social exclusion at the individual level, they may be justified by their role in promoting sustainable residential communities. Although there are hopes that the ‘choice-based’ approaches to lettings which emerged in the late 1990s can both boost community sustainability and counter the disabling impact of coercive approaches, the article suggests it is unlikely that such methods can significantly enhance social inclusion as long as social housing remains a housing sector of last resort, with in-built disadvantages.

Which societies are prone to be compliant with tax laws? Who is willing to pay more for social solidarity? Based on recent surveys in Argentina and Chile, this research paper contrasts two similar countries that show remarkable differences in tax compliance and commitment to social policies. The analysis of the data supports the hypothesis that social variables associated with trust and legitimacy have an independent effect on social solidarity. By extending standard economic models, I argue that paying taxes is also partially contingent on social values, and on the perceived institutional performance of the public sector.

This paper is concerned with the language of policy documents in the field of health care, and how ‘readings’ of such documents might be validated in the context of a narrative analysis. The substantive focus is on a comparative study of UK health policy documents (N = 20) as produced by the various assemblies, governments and executives of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland during the period 2000–09. Following the identification of some key characteristics of narrative structure the authors indicate how text-mining strategies allied with features of semantic and network analysis can be used to unravel the basic elements of policy stories and to facilitate the presentation of data in such a way that readers can verify the strengths (and weaknesses) of any given analysis – with regard to claims concerning, say, the presence, absence or relative importance of key ideas and concepts. Readers can also ‘see’ how the different components of any one story might fit together, and to get a sense of what has been excluded from the narrative as well as what has been included, and thereby assess the reliability and validity of interpretations that have been placed upon the data.

A wellbeing agenda has emerged in government that seeks to promote a ‘politics of happiness’, in which citizens are, as the New Economics Foundation put it, ‘happy, healthy, capable and engaged’ (2004: 2). This article explores the wellbeing agenda in the UK, and its implications for disabled people. We argue that it is unlikely, in its present form, to contribute to the development of social theoretical, or more politically progressive, analysis and understanding of disablement in society. This is because of the emphasis on biologism, personality and character traits, and a policy prognosis that revolves around self-help and therapy, or individuated actions and (self) responsibilities.

Financial exclusion is increasingly being recognised as an important aspect of socio-economic inequality where disadvantaged individuals and communities are isolated from mainstream financial services, particularly affordable and readily available credit. In the face of these problems, social policy initiatives have emerged that have travelled under various names: social investment, micro-finance, community finance and community development finance. These initiatives are seen as the basis of a ‘new economics’ that will create self-sustaining local economies. The government is also promoting community development finance as an aspect of community regeneration with the aim of providing credit to poor communities to stimulate local enterprise and thereby reduce dependency on state support. The same approach is being taken to grant-funded community and voluntary organisations to encourage them into a neo-market approach to the delivery of services. This article explores the phenomenon of community development finance and assesses its proposed role in community regeneration and in relation to the community and voluntary sector.

This article reviews two rounds of pension reform in ten Latin American countries to determine whether they are moving away from individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Although the idea is provocative, we conclude that the notion of ‘moving away from IRAs’ is insufficient to characterise the new politics of pension reform. As opposed to the politics of enactment of IRAs of the late twentieth century, pension reform in Latin America in recent years has combined significant revival of public components in old-age income maintenance with improvement of IRAs. Clearly, the policy prescriptions that were most influential during the first round of reforms in Latin America have been re-evaluated. The World Bank and other organisations that promoted IRAs have recognised that pension reform should pay more attention to poverty reduction, coverage and equity, and to protect participants from market risks. The experience and challenges faced by countries that introduced IRAs, the changes in policies by international financing institutions, and the recent financial volatility and heavy losses experienced in financial markets may have tempered the enthusiasm of other countries from applying the same type of reforms. Scholars and policy-makers around the globe could benefit from looking closely at these changes in pension policy.

In 1996, the US federal government passed welfare reform legislation. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) altered greatly the circumstances under which families can receive public assistance, limiting receipt to 5 years, requiring work after 24 months, and allowing states to impose sanctions and other requirements such as family caps (Greenberg, 1999). Because many countries reforming their social welfare system look to the USA as one possible model, analyses of the effects of US welfare policy on children are of relevance internationally. We find that the population receiving welfare in the USA is highly diverse and that background differences and early experiences explain most of the associations between welfare and poverty and children's outcomes. After taking account of these background differences, we find that children who experienced stable albeit disadvantaged economic conditions did not have worse outcomes than children who were never poor. Nor were children whose families' economic fortunes improved at higher risk for poor outcomes. However, children in families whose financial circumstances declined or fluctuated were more at risk for behavioural problems and scored lower on reading tests than were children who had never been poor.

The second report of the Pensions Commission sought to establish a framework for a sustainable pension system for future generations of pensioners in the UK. The framework has been largely accepted by government in their recent White Paper, Security in Retirement: Towards a New Pension System (2006). Legislation will follow. The Commission and the government have made a number of claims about how their proposals will benefit women. Reforms have been welcomed by women's lobby groups. This article presents a gendered analysis of the Pensions Commission proposals using unpublished data generated by Pensim2, a pensions' simulator developed by the Department for Work and Pensions. Substantial improvements for women will be in the long term only, and will depend heavily on the extent to which gendered patterns of work and family life change in future. For women who follow traditional paths of combining part-time work with looking after children and kin, outcomes will depend on partnering arrangements. If they are married or cohabiting, they will be better off; but if they live alone in later life, the principal advantage of the proposals will be a reduction in means testing rather than an improvement in levels of income.

The objective of this article is to analyse whether the increased reliance on marketisation in the provision of social care challenges the universality of eldercare in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway. The study focuses on national reforms for contracting out and user choice of provider, analysing their consequences for four universalistic dimensions: (i) equal inclusion, (ii) public funding, (iii) public provision and (iv) comprehensive usage. The findings suggest that, although need-based inclusion and public funding remain key principles in all four countries, there is an increased reliance on private provision in Sweden, Denmark and Finland. In addition, the introduction of topping-up services challenges the dimension of comprehensive usage by enabling users with economic resources to turn to the private market to increase the comprehensiveness and quality of their care.

The 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act introduced sweeping changes to health and social welfare services. The reforms to community care were dominated by the introduction of markets for social care. We argue that the new markets cannot be guaranteed to deliver the range of services required to meet community care objectives. When they began to assume their new responsibilities, few key purchasers had a basic understanding of the functioning and imperfections of markets. Consequently, they were poorly equipped to anticipate or ameliorate the sources of market failure that we identify. Like any other relatively ill-informed purchaser, local authorities risk being unable to buy what they want on behalf of their residents and at an appropriate volume, cost and quality. We discuss where and how market imperfections are likely to occur. In this context, we offer an economic framework to help in the shaping and managing of social care markets.

The relationship between political decentralisation and the welfare state is much studied, and large-scale studies have repeatedly found that decentralised states have less generous welfare states. How do we fit that with other studies that emphasise the potential of decentralisation to raise welfare standards? This article argues that decentralisation, as a variable, is too broad and it is more efficient to focus on the structure of veto players in the central state, intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental finance. Those are the actual mechanisms that connect decentralisation to the welfare states, and they can all vary independently of decentralisation. It uses recent changes in the United States and United Kingdom as examples. The fragmentation and average weakness of the US welfare state is mostly due to a federal government riddled with internal veto points that permits considerable interstate variation and low overall average provision, while tight central control on finances in the UK means that most variation is in the organisation, rather than levels, of social services.

This article examines the secular trends in the overall association of parental divorce (or separation) and children's educational attainment at school-leaving age during the period spanning a quarter of a century since the second world war in Britain. The study presents a reanalysis of data from the three British birth cohorts which studied children born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. Equivalent educational attainment at the different time points is defined relative to the population distribution at the time, using the median level. The relative risks (with 95 per cent confidence intervals) of lower than median educational attainment associated with parental divorce (or separation) are 1.3 (1.2 to 1.5), 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) and 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) for the three cohorts respectively. These results refute the commonly held opinion that the effects of divorce on children have attenuated with the increasing prevalence of divorce.

The faltering emergence of new ‘mental health’ legislation in England and Wales between 1998 and 2005 is described. The slow progress largely reflected widespread opposition to the content of the government's plans to replace the Mental Health Act of 1983. That opposition was formalised in the Mental Health Alliance, an umbrella organisation which included user and professional groups as well as voluntary sector bodies. This article highlights the main points of dispute between the government and its opponents. In particular, concerns about compulsion and the duty of the state to guarantee good quality care in every locality divided the government and its critics. The implications of these disputes are discussed, along with some questions about interest work within the Alliance.

Electronic surveillance has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite this, surveillance practices and their social products are yet to receive serious attention in the academic field of social policy. Extending Titmuss’ classical articulation of the social division of welfare, this article develops the notion of the social division of welfare surveillance to point to the way in which surveillance, compliance burdens and risk management unevenly operate within society. The implications for reinforcing social divisions and critical social policy analysis are discussed.

Social cash transfers to the poor have mushroomed in countries of the global South and on global agendas since the 2000s. Around 2000, there was no clear picture if social cash transfers would make it to global agendas. By the end of the 2000s, a repertoire of four models of social cash transfers had been codified by international organizations. Based on an in-depth analysis of all major documents by international organizations and applying a model of ideational change in global arenas, we trace the trajectories of the four models: who developed the models during the 2000s, how were they constructed, and what forces propelled the process? We find that the process was driven by an extension of the domains of international organizations (‘socialization of global politics’) and by an opening of global discourses and development policies to ‘social’ concerns. But organizational domains and global discourses, especially on development, also constrained the concept of social cash transfers, reducing it to four models that reflect a fragmented and incomplete universalism. We conclude that global social policy, conceived as ‘socialization of global politics’, is not a simple ‘uploading’ of ‘social’ ideas from European traditions, but an active process of social construction in global arenas.

The Chinese government has recently expanded the scope of urban social insurance programmes. However, social protection for the labour force of the urban informal sector, which reaches about half the number of urban workers, lags significantly behind. This under-coverage may be due to institutional constraints, particularly the household registration system hukou, and self-selection behaviour related to the limited benefits of social insurance. Drawing on a recent nationwide individual-level survey and city-level statistics, this study examines these two explanations for the under-enrolment on the social insurance programme. First, results suggest that hukou and the intergovernmental fiscal system are major institutional constraints. Second, self-selection behaviour in programme enrolment is verified. Employers in the informal sector are likely to opt out of social insurance. More importantly, employers in the informal sector, with rural or non-local hukou, are likely to opt out of social insurance, which suggests that self-selection behaviour is constrained by institutions. Such findings have important implications for broad theoretical and policy debates on universal social protection.

The determination of the different needs of families of different compositions is necessary in order to ensure horizontal equity in tax/transfer policies. Despite the seeming simplicity of the problem, a consensus as to the appropriate means of determining relative need remains elusive. One approach which has been proposed has been to use social surveys to analyse the relationship between subjective evaluations of well-being and incomes. This paper examines such methods, and discusses the key assumptions upon which they rest. An explanation is advanced as to why these methods may lead to an understatement of the differences in relative needs of different family types.

How does the rising ‘regulatory welfare state’ address social policy concerns in pension markets? This study examines this question by comparing the regulatory responses to high charges paid by low-income workers in pension markets in the UK and Israel. In the UK, with the recognition that the market would not cater to low-income workers, the regulatory response was the creation of a publicly operated low-cost pension fund (NEST), a ‘public option’ within the market. This allowed low-income workers access to a low level of charges, previously reserved for high-income and organised workers. In Israel, regulation sought to empower consumers, while providing minimal social protection by capping pension charges at a relatively high level, thereby leaving most of the responsibility for reducing the charges with the individual saver. By comparing these two cases, the article develops an analytical framework for the study of the regulatory welfare state, making two contributions. First, it highlights different types of regulatory citizenship: minimal regulatory social protection as opposed to a more egalitarian approach. Second, it identifies an overlooked regulatory welfare state strategy: creating ‘public option’ arrangements, whereby a state-run (but not funded) service operates within the market.