Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors – state, market, family/households, employers and charities – but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this ‘welfare mix’ require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people’s views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime theory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also introduces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, but risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Germany and the UK. We collected data using deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people’s justifications for their attitudes. Our research indicated patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people’s justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in attitudes are resilient.

In many developed countries lone parent families face high rates of child poverty. Among those lone parents who do get child maintenance there is a hidden problem. States may retain all, or a proportion, of the maintenance that is paid in order to offset other fiscal costs. Thus, the potential of child maintenance to alleviate poverty among lone parent families may not be fully realized, especially if the families are also in receipt of social assistance benefits. This paper provides an original comparative analysis exploring the effectiveness of child maintenance to reduce child poverty among lone parent families in receipt of social assistance. It addresses the question of whether effectiveness is compromised once interaction effects (such as the operation of a child maintenance disregard) are taken into account in four countries Australia, Finland, Germany and the UK using the LIS dataset (2013). It raises important policy considerations and provides evidence to show that if policy makers are serious about reducing child poverty, they must understand how hidden mechanisms within interactions between child maintenance and social security systems can work as effective cost recovery tools for the state, but have no poverty reduction impact.

Britain's New Labour government will spend some 133 billion this year on social protection for vulnerable groups with low incomes such as pensioners, disabled people, and working families with and without children. It also regularly reviews the National Minimum Wage for workers. Although its intentions are laudable, the government can be criticised for setting income floors with little or no grounded assessment of individual welfare requirements. Budget standards, originating in Rowntree's work on poverty at the close of the nineteenth century, offers an alternative for setting minimum incomes. Used by Beveridge in 1942 to rationalise the proposal for social security levels, they have largely been neglected by successive governments and were recently rejected by New Labour in its review of child poverty measures. Academic research, however, continues to identify non-arbitrary income thresholds. The transparency of evidence to maintain a defined standard of living along with the minimal personal costs involved are key attractions. The challenge remains to find a generally acceptable standard. How much emphasis should be given to scientific prescriptions for health compared to popular cultural practices captured by national surveys of poverty and social exclusion or agreed by the consensus of ordinary citizens in focus groups? This article considers the current debate within UK social policy.

The Beveridge Committee of 1942 is often assumed to have based its proposals for social security scales on a poverty line at the ‘human needs’ or social participation level. This is because of its ‘principle of adequacy of benefit in amount and time’. Using the Committee's working papers, this paper describes the discussions of the committee about the ideas of need and measures of poverty to be used. The evidence shows that the Committee knew very well that its proposed benefit levels were not enough for social participation. Because it consciously implemented the principles of minimum subsistence and less-eligibility in the face of inadequate wages, the proposed scales were arguably more austere even than Rowntree's ‘primary poverty’ standard which both he and Beveridge acknowledged was not sufficient to meet human social needs. Whether muddle or mendacity, this mystification has had serious consequences for the poor in Britain.

This paper examines how the economic climate and policy changes at national level have been affecting organisational practices, aimed at the extension of working lives of older workers, over the last decade. We analyse case studies conducted among Dutch organisations. Our findings show that personnel policies are typically short-term oriented and vary in their existence and content congruous to the economic climate. Policy changes in retirement arrangements, and the debate about raising the official retirement age, have made both employees and employers realise that the extension of working lives has become an unavoidable fact, although both parties still seem intrinsically opposed to it. Changes to safety regulations and the increase in costs for employers if employees drop out of work due to ill health have led to an increasing focus on health-related measures in professions with intense physical work over the last decade. We conclude that, while national level policy changes in areas like health and safety do percolate down and begin to affect organisational practice, it is at the organisational level that they still need to be worked through.

This article analyses and compares the multi-dimensional co-ordination of employment and social policies at the Italian local level, especially focusing on the policy implementation stage. It departs from developing a theoretical framework to take into account the crucial variables that might potentially impact on the co-ordination of social cohesion policies. In particular, following a neo-institutionalist approach, great emphasis is placed on the legacy of the Weberian bureaucratic model, and its implied ‘specialisation ethos’. In addition, the effect of other contextual variables, such us social capital and the rate of unemployment, are considered.

The empirical analysis confirms the crucial impact of the specialisation ethos in preventing inter-policy co-ordination from occurring at the Italian local level, and the relevance of other contextual variables in causing policy integration within services, rather than between services.

This article critically reflects on the administration of activation services in the UK. It describes the welfare-to-work quasi-market and focuses on the impact of 2008 commissioning reforms that advocated amalgamating small contracts into larger ‘lots’, creating a top tier of prime providers to manage subcontractors, and increasing outcome-based funding. Drawing on transaction cost theory and empirical case study research, it is demonstrated that these changes led to an increase in a range of activities and costs for competing service providers that undermine government rhetoric of choice and efficiency. This article adds to the existing literature on welfare-to-work contracting by demonstrating the difficulties some organisations face in the context of welfare markets and questioning public service out-sourcing processes. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for future market-based social policy reforms.

With the introduction of the Community Care (Delayed Discharges etc.) Act 2003, delayed discharges from hospital have become a key area of government concern within UK health and social services. Under the Act, social services departments will be fined for any patient who remains in hospital when they are medically fit to leave but are unable to do so due to a delay in arranging a social care package. Against this background, this article reviews the extensive literature on hospital discharge in the UK, identifying key themes within the research evidence and citing examples from relevant studies to illustrate the key issues at stake. This analysis is then used to inform a new framework for understanding and responding to the problems associated with delayed hospital discharge and of partnership working between health and social care more generally.

In the context of the new automatic enrolment requirements for all eligible employees to make pension provision for their employees, and the importance of trust in pension provision, this article utilises data from the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey, which, in its 2005 wave, asked correspondents specific questions regarding pension provision. We integrate two different empirical approaches in order to achieve a more robust understanding of pension confusion in Scotland. We find that pension confusion is dominated by pension uncertainty and myopia, but these may be reduced for those working in the financial sector. We consider the implications of these findings for the relationship of trust between employers and their employees, as well as for trust in government pension policy more generally.

This paper studies pension insecurity in a sample of non-retired individuals aged 50 years or older from 18 European countries. We capture pension insecurity with the subjective expectations on the probability that the government will reduce the pensions of the individual before retirement or will increase the statutory retirement age. We argue that changes in economic conditions and policy affect the formation of such probabilities, and through this, subjective wellbeing. In particular, we study the effects of pension insecurity on subjective wellbeing with pooled linear models, regressions per quintiles and instrumental variables. We find a statistically significant, stable and negative association between pension insecurity and subjective wellbeing. Our findings reveal that the individuals who are more affected by pension insecurity are those who are further away from their retirement, have lower income, assess their life survival as low, have higher cognitive abilities and do not expect private pension payments.

Defining asset poverty as insufficiency of assets to satisfy household basic needs for a limited period of time, the study examines asset-poverty rates in urban China using the 2002 survey data from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP). We find that asset-poverty rates in urban China are lower than those of developed countries, in part due to Chinese households’ strong commitment to precautionary savings and the low poverty standards. However, the liquid asset-poverty rate is five times that of the income-poverty rate in urban China. Notably, the asset-poverty-gap ratio shows that most households in asset poverty have zero liquid assets or negative net worth. Asset building could be an integral part of the anti-poverty agenda to protect the poor from economic hardship and provide them with opportunities for economic growth.

Evaluation studies of active labour market policy show different activation measures generate contradictory results. In the present study, we argue that these contradictory results are due to the fact that the outcomes of activation measures depend on other institutions. The outcome measure in this study is the long-term unemployment rate. Two labour market institutions are of special interest in this context: namely, employment protection and unemployment benefits. Both institutions, depending on their design, may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of active labour market policies in lowering long-term unemployment. Based on an analysis of macro-level data on 20 countries over a period of 16 years, our results show that employment protection strictness and unemployment benefit generosity interact with the way in which active labour market policies relate to long-term unemployment. Our results also indicate that, depending on the measure used, active labour market policies fit either in a flexible or in a coordinated labour market. This suggests that active labour market policies can adhere to both institutional logics, which are encapsulated in different types of measures.

This paper discusses the notion of paternalism, and its application to the evaluation of social policies. It attempts first to define the concept, using Mill's distinction between self- and other-regarding actions. A paternalistic policy is one in which the government renders a self-regarding action less eligible for a citizen, with the intention of benefiting the citizen in question. This concept is then applied to the analysis of redistribution by means of social policy measures. Two questions are discussed: (a) whether any redistribution must be paternalist, and (b) whether redistribution in kind is more paternalist than redistribution in cash. It is argued that paternalism need not be the explanation for the policy in either case. Finally three criteria are specified in terms of which paternalistic interventions by the state might be assessed as justified or not.

To what extent, in the context of severe economic crisis, do governments of the right and the left have room for manoeuvre to choose their fiscal consolidation paths? To what degree might this margin be broader in multilevel systems? The severity of the crisis suffered by Spain since 2007, combined with the significant scope of the powers and related expenditure capacities of the Autonomous Communities, make the Spanish regions a highly suitable case for controlled comparisons of fiscal adjustment policies and welfare reforms. Specifically examining healthcare retrenchment in the regions, we find that although the regional governments were all subjected to considerable budget constraints and were forced to cut social policies, they were also able to ensure a certain degree of leeway in selecting their individual healthcare retrenchment policies, in part by strategically utilising the multilevel institutions provided by the Spanish Autonomic State.

Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis models in conjunction with the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) this paper reports the first application of the concept of Social Quality to a UK data set. Social Quality is concerned with the quality of society, or social relations, and consists of both a theoretical model and an empirically tested set of measures. Social Quality is explored in relation to the policy issues of low pay and the working poor given the challenges presented by the rising number of households in work and in poverty. This analysis reveals several striking characteristics. In terms of poverty per se poor employees are worse off in terms of economic security, housing, health, human capital, trust, voluntarism, citizenship, knowledge and culture whichever part of the employment structure they belong to. However, in addition, even those in the so-called upper level of the labour market (professional, managerial occupations which require reasonably high levels of skill and motivation) are significantly worse off on these dimensions if they are low paid. Therefore it suggests that measures to raise low pay, such as the living wage, are likely to have considerable implications for Social Quality.

A welfare state’s tax system does not solely redistribute from rich to poor (vertical) but also between family types (horizontal). Different types of families are treated differently due to gendered (de)familialization policies in the tax code, such as joint filing for spouses or single-parent relief. In this study I aim to examine the tax system’s modification of horizontal income inequality between the six most prevalent family types of non-retiree households. To answer my research aim I draw on harmonized data from 30 countries provided by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). I estimate pre- and post-fiscal income inequality measured as between-family-type Theil indices. Using multivariate linear regression, I examine the association of the percentage change in inequality and the prevalence of family type-related tax characteristics. The results show that welfare states with familialization tax policies reduce less horizontal income inequality compared to welfare states without familialization tax policies. As familialization tax policies provide additional benefits for breadwinners with dependents, they discourage labour market participation of secondary earners and might exacerbate gender inequalities.

The paper aims to contribute to the normative debate concerning work enforcement in liberal democracies. In the late 1980s, OECD countries began to revert to the pre-welfare-state tradition of attributing unemployment to personal failure. The new welfare-to-work policies emphasised individual responsibility for securing employment. Stepping up job search requirements and sanctions for failure to meet them was presented as a public intervention that helps unemployed individuals return from dependency to autonomy. Jobseekers have been made to believe that success in obtaining employment depends on how doggedly they search for work and how adaptable they become to employer needs. These presumptions are challenged in the paper. Contracts that jobseekers are forced to sign with providers of employment services curtail their autonomy not only to the extent that they cannot avoid unproductive activity tests imposed on them, but also from a lifetime perspective in cases where they are forced into inferior jobs. In job-short economies, employers are also certain to discriminate against disadvantaged jobseekers notwithstanding the intensity of their effort or openness to occupational change.

Developments in the realms of social work practice, writing and research have provided fuel for the claim that the opinion of the consumer should exercise a formative influence in the development of policies impinging on the social services. However, it is difficult to decide when the opinion of the consumer has been understood. Also, even when the views of consumers are known, the question of how these views are utilized in the formulation of policies remains problematic. Furthermore, weaknesses in the research strategies of recent studies limit the applicability of policy recommendations which occur in this literature.

Despite the increased attention paid to federal-state unemployment insurance (UI) schemes after the Great Recession (2007–2009), research examining the policy characteristics and the underlying logic shaping the social protection provided by a federal-state UI system is limited. Integrating the perspectives of policy design theory, comparative welfare politics, and fiscal welfare, this paper examines the unequal social protection under the American UI system during and after the Great Recession. By using model-based cluster analysis and fixed-effect panel regression models, this paper identifies three distinct UI approaches, i.e. the limited social protection approach, the unbalanced social protection approach, and the balanced social protection approach. The policy choices made by those states that follow the three approaches reflect different mixtures of policy logic, including social protection, economic stabilization, work disincentives, and interstate competition. The overall downward trend in social protection signals that the American UI system is under-prepared for the next economic recession, thereby exposing unemployed workers to the risk of economic insecurity. These findings provide implications for future policy designs aiming to strengthen the social protection of the federal-state UI system.