Using data from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, this article explores the relationship between working part-time and progression out of low pay for male and female employees using a discrete-time event history model. The results show that working part-time relative to full-time decreases the likelihood of progression out of low pay, defined as earning below two-thirds of the median hourly wage. However, part-time workers who transition to full-time employment experience similar rates of progression to full-time workers. This casts doubt on the idea that part-time workers have lower progression rates because they have lower abilities or work motivation and reinforces the need to address the quality of part-time jobs in the UK labour market. The negative effect of working part-time is greater for men than for women, although women are more at risk of becoming trapped in low pay in the sense that they tend to work part-time for longer periods of time, particularly if they have children. Factors such as childcare policy and Universal Credit (UC) incentivise part-time employment for certain groups, although in the right labour market conditions UC may encourage some part-time workers to increase their working hours.

Despite recent declines in child poverty in the UK, there is evidence that children from the poorest families remain a legitimate concern. Little is known about the circumstances of children in severe poverty for whom policy responses may need to be different. This study examines the extent and risk factors of severe child poverty in the UK, based on the 2004/5 Family Resources Survey. Given the multi-dimensional nature of poverty, its measurement encompasses both material deprivation (child and parent deprivation) and low household income. The results show significant regional variations in severe child poverty experience, ranging from 3 per cent of children in South and East England to 10 per cent in London. The multinomial logistic regression results conform to what might be expected, showing relatively high risks of severe poverty among children: with workless parents; whose parents have low levels of education; in large families of four or more children; from ethnic minority groups, especially of Asian origin; and in families with disabled adult(s). However, the results with respect to lone parenthood and benefit receipt do not conform to expected patterns. For instance, the overall risk of severe poverty is lower for children of lone parents, compared to those of similar background characteristics with both parents. Also, the results suggest that non-receipt of benefits in the family is associated with higher likelihood of experience of severe child poverty, an issue that requires policy attention and is worth investigating in future research.

The article discusses government policies towards unemployed people in the context of the development of ‘fair employment’ policy in Northern Ireland. It presents results from a survey of long-term unemployed people in West Belfast which challenge the direction and content of existing training and employment schemes, and their capacity to address inequalities in unemployment between Catholics and Protestants. The article argues that current supply side labour market policies are having limited impact in Northern Ireland and goes on to explore policies to influence labour demand. On the basis of interviews with employers, a number of policies are advocated, including giving priority to recruitment of long-term unemployed people in areas of high unemployment by means of making grant aid conditional.

This article derives from a two year study of ‘Home Supervision’, conducted as part of a programme of research on the Children (Scotland) Act 1995. The focus is on children looked after by the local authority who are on a legal supervision order at home, primarily as a consequence of having been abused or neglected, having offended or having failed to attend school without reasonable excuse. Two assumptions, both arguably a legacy of Lipsky, are challenged: first, that non-implementation by street-level bureaucrats is in opposition to their managers; and, second, the passivity of clients in respect of policy making. It is argued that the street-level bureaucrats and managers in the Home Supervision study share assumptive worlds in respect of children on home supervision, and that clients, as agentic actors, reveal a capacity for shaping policy at the implementation stage. These issues are explored and their implications for implementation studies and child welfare are discussed.

Many of the principles of the Community Care White Paper (DoH, 1989) bear a striking resemblance to the Welsh mental handicap strategy launched six years earlier (Welsh Office, 1983). This paper considers the lessons to be learnt from the Welsh strategy for the development of needs-led services as promulgated by the White Paper. Similarities and differences between the two policy initiatives are first identified before considering the conceptual basis of needs-led services. Attention is drawn to two interdependent dimensions of needs-led services, user participation and management delegation, as a means of depicting three underlying models, each with different value stances. By drawing from a case study of one area in Wales, an attempt is made to test the expectations for needs-led services in terms of local planning and management requirements of the three models against the experiences of those charged with putting them into practice. Implications for the White Paper are explored in connection with user involvement strategies and assessment and care management processes.

The article suggests that self-reflexive participation should be considered a distinct form of client participation. Self-reflexive participation is an individualized form of participation that occurs through a development-oriented dialogue between the client and a practitioner. In this dialogue, clients reflect on themselves, set goals for the future and devise strategies, thereby improving their self-regulatory potentials. The article discusses important differences between self-reflexive participation and democratic, consumerist and co-productive participation in terms of the form participation takes, the aim of participation, the client role, the resources required from clients to participate, the assumed relationship between the agency and the client and organizational responsiveness. Self-reflexive participation is based on a view of the client as capable and reflexive and it may foster a tailoring of social services to the wishes and life-projects of clients. However, self-reflexive participation is based on the assumption that clients can be empowered through improved skills of self-observation and life-planning. When focus is on these skills, it may gloss over important conflicts between clients and agency and detach questions of client participation from organizational responsiveness and struggles over user control.

The ‘welfare modelling business’ has been at the heart of comparative social policy analysis but debate has largely proceeded on the basis that coherent national welfare states exist. This assumption was always problematic but globalisation processes have added a further dimension to this debate. In particular, geographers and sociologists have pointed to the increasing power of global cities that act as co-ordinating hubs for the global economy. Though residing in nation states, these cities have a special status flowing from their central role in the global economy. Little attempt has been made to explore the implications of these cities for welfare regimes and welfare regime analysis. This paper addresses this under explored issue and suggests there are strong overlaps between global city types and welfare types.

How do political leaders politicise welfare state “reform pressures”, e.g. unemployment, ageing or globalisation, in election campaigns? Competing expectations range from no politicization at all to a clear and unbiased coupling between pressures and intended policy responses. Eighteen speeches held by prime ministerial candidates at election-year party congresses in Germany, Norway and Sweden (2000–2010) reveal an unfinished and biased problem-solution coupling. On the one hand, even in these affluent countries pressures are frequently politicised. On the other hand, leaders either cherry-pick less painful policy solutions, or refrain altogether from debating them. So, while citizens learn that the welfare state is pressured, they are not exposed to the full range of policies they increasingly have reason to expect after elections.

Capitalist economies depend on private business investment, and all governments in similar states compete to induce businesses to invest through various policy interventions. In so doing, they compete with other governments to retain current investors and to encourage new ones from elsewhere. The implications for policy-making and, by extension, citizens, are huge. The pressure on governments to capture new investment has an impact on taxation policies, workplace regulations, legal protections, public infrastructure and social policies. However, not all governments compete for investment in the same way at the same time, and not all businesses are attracted by the same inducements offered by states, highlighting the possibility that public policies shape investment strategies, just as investment strategies also shape public policies. It is its development of relatively unique and aggressive strategies to capture new investment that places the UK in a vulnerable position post-Brexit. It has successfully attracted mobile corporations to its shores, in part because it has offered a particularly favourable gateway into Europe for foreign capital. This raises questions about how the country will seek to compete for capital investment in future. This paper examines these questions with reference to both theoretical and empirical evidence.

Formal social citizenship is limited in how it enables us to think about informal social citizenship and informal welfare. This informal perspective is important in all contexts where access to social rights is negotiated through local and transnational spaces, and where the state is a relatively minor player. By drawing on work on moral economy (Scott, 1976) and informal welfare (Gough and Wood, 2006) the article aims to propose a new theoretical model to understand the nature and social practice of both informal citizenship and welfare. This model departs from a western-centric understanding of nation-state-based citizenship and national welfare states, adopting instead the perspective that informal social citizenship and welfare have existed independently of the nation state as long as there have been human communities. Formal citizenship together with formal welfare rights represent just one particular crystallization of such informal practice. Our proposed model highlights the interdependent (rather than evolutionary) relationship between formal welfare at national level and informal welfare practices at local and transnational levels.

Swedish welfare is often characterized as comprehensive and generous. Social assistance constitutes the final safety net in the Swedish model. Unlike most other benefits, eligibility and subsidy levels are here subject to extensive means-testing, with eligibility determined by individual caseworkers. In this article, we explore the extent to which eligibility determination and generosity of benefits have changed in social assistance assessments over three decades, relating these to changes in regulations over the same period.

The article presents data from three independent vignette studies conducted in the mid-1990s, mid-2000s and in 2018 respectively. The data consist of assessments of a total of six vignettes, made by individual caseworkers (n=1 337). The results indicate that overall generosity in social assistance has decreased considerably over the last 25 years and that, despite both national and local initiatives to reduce individual variation in assessments, disparities have instead increased.

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares in stock and new construction since the first housing laws around 1900. The interpolated benchmark time series generally describes the rise and fall of social housing across a residual, a socialist, and a Northern-European housing group. The decline was steeper than for the classical welfare state, but the degree of erosion was surprisingly small in some countries where public housing associations remained resilient. Within the broader housing welfare state, social housing correlates positively with rent regulation and allowances, but negatively with homeownership subsidies and liberal mortgage regulation. A multivariate analysis shows that social housing is rather explained by housing shortages and complementarities with rental and welfare policies than by typical welfare state theories (GDP, political parties). Generally, the paper shows that conventional housing typologies are difficult to defend over time and argues more generally for including housing decommodification in welfare state research.

Research on the politics of social investment finds public opinion to be highly supportive of expansive reforms and expects this support to matter for the politics of expanding social investment. Expanding social investment, it is argued, should be particularly attractive to left-wing voters and parties because of the egalitarian potential of such policies. However, few studies have examined to what extent individual preferences concerning social investment really matter politically. In this paper, I address this research gap for the crucial policy field of childcare by examining how individual-level preferences for expanding childcare provision translate into voting behavior. Based on original survey data from eight European countries, I find that preferences to expand public childcare spending indeed translate into electoral support for the left. However, this link from preferences to votes turns out to be socially biased. Childcare preferences are much more decisive for voting the further up individuals are in the income distribution. This imperfect transmission from preferences to voting behavior implies that political parties could have incentives to target the benefits of childcare reforms to their more affluent voters. My findings help to explain why governments frequently fail to reduce social inequality of access to seemingly egalitarian childcare provision.

Although health inequalities in England reflect underlying deprivation, there is considerable variation among deprived areas in the extent to which these inequalities are narrowing. Using survey data from 15 local authority areas in North West England, and Ragin's technique of Qualitative Comparative Analysis, contextual features and ways of working in these areas are shown to combine in systematic ways with recent trends in inequalities as measured by premature mortality. For circulatory diseases, a narrowing mortality gap showed a clear association with smoking cessation services that accorded with a best practice description, combined with a local population with relatively more people aged 65 or older. For cancers, a narrowing mortality gap was associated with areas that combined relatively low population mobility with a professional working culture described as one of individual commitment and championing. These findings reveal the complexity of meeting health inequality targets and applying evidence to this endeavour, since both ways of working and context appear to be important to making progress. Both need to be understood case by case if targets are to be locally realistic and evidence applied where local practice is known to matter to the outcome.

High levels of long-term unemployment have undermined some of the assumptions of the post-war welfare state. In response most OECD governments are now replacing what have been characterised as passive income support payments with active benefit systems. Many have introduced new time limits to unconditional benefit entitlement in the form of job and training guarantees for those without work. This article describes how the 1993–6 Australian Labor government modernised its commitment to full employment by combining labour market programmes and social security reforms to create a Job Compact for the long-term unemployed. It analyses the achievements of the strategy and what went wrong, and it draws out lessons of relevance to the British Labour government which has committed itself to using job guarantees to build new bridges between welfare and work.

As a result of the consolidation of democracy and the spread of globalisation, the Korean welfare regime has undergone significant changes. This article examines the changes that have occurred since the 1990s. Overall social policy has benefited from a marked increase in expenditure since the 1990s. This has been especially visible in terms of the ratio of social expenditures to GDP, which reached 11 per cent by 1998. These changes in Korean social policy brought about a readjustment of the roles of both government and the private sector. The development of income maintenance programmes has been the core change within the Korean welfare regime. Unlike income maintenance programmes, public social services have developed at a rather sluggish pace. The provision of social services has long been regarded as the responsibility of the family and has changed relatively little in comparison to income maintenance programmes. Although Korean social policy has undergone remarkable changes, it would be erroneous to argue that a complete shift in the welfare regime has taken place.

To ask about a country's family policy is to ask how state action, government policies, are actually affecting families and the quality of family life – not just poor families, but all families in that country. French family policy is considered under three headings: (1) the political significance of the family in France, (2) the social security services designed to increase the economic viability of the family and to promote family welfare, and (3) the adjustment of French family policy to the changing economic situation and aspirations of ordinary families. Comparisons are drawn with British policies under each heading and the conclusion drawn that compared with Britain France has a more conscious, clearly defined concept of family policy, which finds expression firstly in statutory and voluntary institutions whose primary or even sole purpose is to promote the welfare of the family, and secondly, in a whole range of statutory benefits to which the parents of the nuclear family are entitled as of right.

This longitudinal study examined the association between heavy alcohol use, alcohol- and drug-screening requirements, and social support network variables and mothers' welfare participation in the United States. The study was a secondary data analysis of 3,517 mothers. The sample was extracted from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data gathered in 1994–2004. Results of logistic regression show welfare participation is not associated with heavy alcohol use or alcohol- and drug-screening requirements, but is associated with a history of reported heavy alcohol use, informal help with childcare, and scant human capital. Results also indicate that alcohol- and drug screening required under TANF may not exclude heavy drinking mothers from TANF participation, and that social support networks do not cancel heavy drinking's association with participation. Policy implications are discussed.

This study addresses the Islamic Movement in Israel. Hitherto studied almost exclusively from the political perspective, this article sheds light on its social roles as a provider of welfare services to the Palestinian population. It does so by analysing its unique Independent Community (IC) concept, which calls for self-reliance in welfare service provision. Despite its importance, the concept, which applies to all spheres of life and is relevant to other indigenous minorities, has received relatively little attention in the literature. The present study, which is part of the ‘religious turn’ in welfare state literature, addresses this gap by describing IC and its development, and by explaining how the concept developed in the context of the Palestinian population's social discrimination and exclusion.

Based on findings from various archival sources and interviews with movement leaders, the article concludes that the concept of IC is a response to discriminatory and exclusionary welfare policies. Together with the broader local and global process of welfare state retrenchment, this created a vacuum that proved fertile ground for the emergence of IC, calling for a reshaping of Israel's social policies and the role played by the welfare state vis-à-vis faith-based organizations that represent indigenous minorities.

It is commonly argued that democratic-welfare capitalist societies face a continual tension between market individualist and need-oriented welfare values. If this is so, the attempt by the British Conservative Government of the 1980s to administer a brisk restorative to the welfare state with a purging dose of market principles seems likely to generate a tenacious opposition. This paper uses the transfer of sick pay responsibilities to employers through the 1983 Statutory Sick Pay scheme as a case study, to examine with what success market-based ideologies have encroached on people's conceptions of welfare citizenship.