Numerous studies have demonstrated that the provision of early childhood education and childcare services (ECEC) is associated with higher women’s participation in the labor market. However, many questions about the causal relationship between the supply of childcare and patterns of female employment remain open. In an effort to overcome common endogeneity problems, we conducted a conjoint experiment in Switzerland, which enables us to analyze mothers’ employment intentions in different – and even in some hypothetical – contexts. Our results demonstrate that improving the provision of ECEC services does affect mothers’ intentions to engage in paid labor. Nevertheless, mothers comprise a heterogeneous group. As expected, ECEC services’ effects are limited for mothers with comparatively high levels of employment. In contrast, mothers with low levels of employment are quite reactive to changing policy contexts, especially if external childcare spots for preschoolers become affordable. Notably, elasticity is present not only in the behavior of women with preferences for supplementary, external childcare, but also in that of women with preferences for parental or home-centered childcare. Our study thus highlights childcare policies’ potential to change the patterns of female employment in contexts marked by persistent traditional gender roles and limited childcare provision.

Nottingham is one of 23 local authorities designated as ‘programme authorities’ under the Inner Urban Areas Act 1978. Between 1983 and 1985 the authors carried out research into the formulation of inner city policy, its application to the Radford area in particular and the opinions of residents there about its impact. Interviews with a wide range of those involved with policy including local authority officers and members and representatives of the police, the health authority and regional Department of the Environment (DoE) revealed considerable institutional and political barriers to a joint inner city strategy in a shire district, even where the same party holds political control. Structures set up to liaise are cordial but clumsy, slow and very much removed from daily service delivery. As elsewhere, the local authorities are critical of lack of central government commitment to this part of the Urban Programme, but nevertheless work well with regional DoE. Paradoxically, however, despite their criticisms of a lack of central funds and of inappropriate spatial and other parameters, the local authority and health authority respondents are anxious for the Programme to continue as it provides both the resources and the justification for innovatory and redistributive projects which would otherwise have been financially and politically impossible.

This study investigates the legal status and treatment of the youthful offender in Israel. Due to a legal provision, in the case of the youthful offender, the court is required to receive a pre-sentencing report from a probation officer; however, there is no institutionalized indication as to how or to what degree the judges should follow the report. Our findings reveal that both judges and probation officers adhere to high professional standards and make their decisions according to the specific case brought in front of them, and that they are not affected by social class or ethnic stereotypes. In spite of a considerable correspondence between the recommendations made by the probation officers and the decisions made by the judges, one cannot avoid noticing also some discrepancy. This is attributed to the strong therapeutic values which characterize the probation officers' training and which are less evident among the judges. The consequences of this discrepancy are analysed and discussed and a few steps to narrow the gap are suggested.

The ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the 1960s in the United States and the rising welfare expectations all over the world have sharpened a continuing debate about the relative merits of a variety of proposals for dealing with want. A discussion of the Soviet approach may provide a useful perspective for us and for other countries. Income maintenance programmes in the Soviet Union, as they had developed up to 1968, have been studied by this author. In this paper, an attempt is made to bring developments up to date, focusing on what they suggest in regard to policy for the 1970s.

The connections between social and environmental policies have a longer and more fertile history than is often appreciated. Ignoring that history is not just unfortunate in its own terms but may mean that we deprive ourselves of resources that could be useful in the future. Unfortunately, social policy histories avoid discussion of the natural environment, just as environmental histories avoid discussion of welfare services. This article therefore seeks to open up new debates and a new field of research. It focuses upon one of the key periods in the development of UK state welfare, the Labour government of 1945–51. It argues that Labour displayed an ambivalence toward the natural environment. Land nationalisation had long been an aspiration, but Labour drew back from its more radical ambitions. In policy terms, this gave rise to a dualism. Town and country planning became one of its enduring legacies, but more socialistic, redistributive measures fell by the wayside.

In many Western countries local welfare agencies retain large responsibilities in the practical organisation of means-tested support. While this may lead to substantial differences in the application trajectories of prospective claimants, what has garnered little empirical research is how local agencies use their discretion to implement practices that may encourage or discourage take-up. In addition, we know little on the extent to which variation in local implementation is attributable to differences in local conditions. Focusing on Belgium as an interesting case, this article addresses this gap by mapping the variation in local implementation practices in specific aspects of social assistance that are relevant in terms of limiting non-take-up. We assess whether certain local political, socio-demographic or economic characteristics favour implementation practices, using structural equation modelling on custom-collected data on the practical organisation of social assistance application trajectories in 119 Belgian municipalities. The results show that local welfare agencies implement coherent practices regarding information provision, accessibility, trust and the locus of initiative in the claiming process. We find the political orientation of the municipality and the share of foreigners in the municipality to be related with, respectively, shifting the locus of initiative away from the welfare claimant and a focus on information provision.

From a humble experiment to tackle social problems, social enterprises (SEs) have transformed into key co-producers for a wide range of social services. However, despite an increasing interest in co-production, most SE studies in the field adopted a single-sided view of co-production, thereby limiting what co-production entails and how it works in SE. Drawing upon the New Public Governance (NPG) framework and an integrative view of co-production that embraces individual and collective action, we explored how the co-production process is enacted and designed from a service provider’s perspective and presented qualitative insights from eight SEs in providing work-integration services for people with disabilities. Our findings revealed strategic, operational and identity dimensions of co-production in SE. We also showed the different roles that SEs and their stakeholders play in co-production and how these affect the processes. We offer a new contribution to SE co-production literature by highlighting a multi-dimensional co-production process model of SEs in their quest to deliver social services.

In transition societies such as contemporary Bulgaria, the legacy of the communist past in childcare policy is reflected in the state-centred mentality of officials, the tendency towards over-regulation and the complex and inefficient relations among multiple state actors. The traditional approach to children as objects of protection rather than as subjects of rights still prevails. Efforts to modernise legislation and to introduce innovative childcare schemes lack provision of implementation mechanisms. Such efforts are often driven more by the government's need to show progress to international and EU agencies than by commitment to a rights-based approach in childcare. Bulgarian and international NGOs gradually assume a more decisive role in childcare. Reform is needed in institutional care, legislation, administrative structures of childcare, training of professionals and the mentality of care providers, politicians, bureaucrats and the wider public. However, reforms depend on genuine political will to change and implement policies, allocation of funds and change in attitudes.

The establishment of internal markets for healthcare provision in publicly-funded healthcare systems brings forth a number of new regulatory challenges. During the 2003 healthcare reform in Turkey, universal health coverage (UHC) was implemented concurrently with the establishment of an internal market for service provision, resulting in an increase in private sector activity. In this context, this paper explores how, in the Turkish case, the macro-level adoption of an internal market model for healthcare provision has shaped patient experiences at the micro-level in their ability to receive treatment in private hospitals offering publicly-funded services (PHOPS). It also examines the influence of the internal market on the realised publicness of healthcare services in Turkey. Data for the study were obtained from patient complaints that appeared on a private online platform and 20 patient interviews. These showed that patients sometimes face significant challenges, including pressure to make informal payments, when accessing their entitlements, which is evidence of the erosion of publicness in a hybrid healthcare system. These challenges emerge from information asymmetry between patients and providers; a large space for PHOPS to manoeuvre when deciding to register patients as insurance holders or private patients; and the ineffective public regulation of the internal market.

Social Policy as an academic discipline has been at the forefront of many progressive movements in society, exploring problems of poverty, hardship, exclusion and suffering, government intervention, and the critical appraisal of those interventions. Yet it has been strangely silent on issues of sexual identity and gender identity and the inequities faced by the LGBTQ+ community. In this article we draw upon lesbian and gay studies, and queer studies, to, first, unpack how heteronormativity is reinforced in social policy in practice and in its analysis within Social Policy as a discipline. This illustrates how the family, as a core basis for welfare in societies, has meant that, reflexively, the base unit of analysis within Social Policy has been the heterosexual family, without a full interrogation of what this means for different groups. Second, we review the limited evidence available around the inequalities LGBTQ+ people face, primarily in the UK (and wider global North), highlighting how the years of oppression have made “counting” this group of people difficult within our usual survey instruments. Thus, while Social Policy has aimed to achieve a universal social citizenship for all, it has inadvertently remained silent on how to include LGBTQ+ in its analysis.

In late 1975, for the first time in the history of the National Health Service, junior hospital doctors in the United Kingdom took industrial action. Their pay and working conditions were basic issues, but the dispute was complex. The first part of this article describes these complexities – the significant events, and the grievances and their resolution. In the second part the dispute is analysed in terms of its causes, effects and implications, particularly for the medical profession. The ambivalence, confusion and ignorance about the new contract and the question of breaking government pay policy, problems of representation, and conflicts of interests within the profession are highlighted. It is suggested that the significant economic gains of the junior doctors were not achieved by industrial action.

A welfare benefit concerns a ‘need’ which a society has decided ‘ought’ to be met. What match is there between the system of welfare which has been laid down by legislation, and the way in which the members of society who are the potential recipients conceive of it? If, as Titmuss has said, definitions of needs are the interdependent manifestations ‘first, of society's wish to survive as an organic whole and, secondly, of the expressed wish of all the people to assist the survival of some people,’ how are these two objectives related, and how do the concepts of need held by ‘all the people’ match those held by the ‘some’? How in practice is the ‘need’ defined, and how do individuals define their own needs?

Public assistance in Israel has increasingly become the focus of public debate. This article examines the social function of the system, its structure and its mode of operation, and considers its place in the broader framework of the country's social policy. Particular attention is paid to the prevailing political culture which obliges the system to wage a continuous struggle to preserve its legitimacy and organizational survival, and to obtain adequate resources to meet the requirements of the population in need. In conclusion, it questions the efficiency and effectiveness of the assistance system in view of the growing trend to expand selective social services.

This article investigates the drivers of trade union choices in the social policy arena in the age of austerity. Against the background of a political economy literature mostly emphasising trade union support for their stronger constituency – i.e. the ‘insiders’ – the article shows the existence of mechanisms potentially inducing trade unions to broaden their demands. Empirically, the study rests on an in-depth comparative analysis of the political process inducing the two largest trade unions in Argentina and Italy, the CGT and the CGIL, to support ‘pro-outsider’ social policy actively. Besides the comparison of two different geographical areas – though not so different in terms of original welfare state configuration – the main contribution of this article is outlining how the combination of dwindling organizational resources and growing competition from social movements and/or new radical unions leads traditionally insider-oriented unions to reach out to new constituencies and advocate expanded redistributive demands.

A new group of Western development donors has emerged as increasingly influential actors in global social policy. Big philanthropies have begun implementing social protection projects on a vast scale across the Global South and have become integrated within global governance structures. It is essential to examine whether their approach to social policy in the South is effective, legitimate and desirable for the substantive agendas and programmes in these countries and for analysis of social policy in a development context. This study investigates contemporary big philanthropies through a qualitative case-study of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its role in the health sector in Tanzania. It examines the ways in which big philanthropies engage and seek to influence policy on the ground, directly exploring the views and experiences of local stakeholders. The study finds that big philanthropies have distinctive features and mechanisms as global social policy entrepreneurs. In contrast to the vertical and linear processes associated with traditional policy transfer, a more messy and complex set of mechanisms are observed. The study also indicates that despite considerable resources and authority, philanthropic donors may not be effective in securing policy reform within aid-receiving countries due to a lack of transparency and embeddedness.

Sure Start local programmes (SSLPs), an area-based early intervention programme for under fives in England set up in 1998, was replaced by children's centres (CCs), a universal, mainstream service, under the control of local authorities in 2003. This paper uses qualitative data from three urban authorities in an exploratory study that investigates how far CCs differ from SSLPs, and how far they are more recognisably similar to one another than were SSLPs. We explore interviewees’ understandings of the idea of an SSLP and of a CC; differences between the core offers of the two programmes in terms of funding, consistency, local responsiveness and the balance of services; issues arising from making CCs a mainstream service; and changes in governance in terms of information flows, lines of accountability and parent participation. We find that while CCs differ from SSLPs in significant respects, they also differ one from the other, and we offer some reflections on the possible causes of this.