This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth inequality and deservingness valuations regarding the wealthy affect popular support for a personal wealth tax. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between self-interest and deservingness. Using original survey data and a vignette design, we find that subjective self-interest is more important than objective self-interest, and that providing information on aggregate wealth inequality can shift the attitudes of those who are otherwise indifferent in favour of wealth taxation. Furthermore, deservingness valuations impact support for taxation in important ways. Factors indicating meritocratic wealth accumulation reduce support, and this is especially pronounced among low-status respondents. By contrast, while non-meritocratic factors increase support for taxation, these effects are largely off-set in privileged groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that self-interest and deservingness valuations impact attitudes towards wealth taxation in opposing directions, and that providing information to those otherwise indifferent might increase redistributive preferences.

A growing number of studies investigate the relative importance of the major deservingness criteria (control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, need) in explaining the perceived welfare deservingness of different social groups. This paper addresses the roles of those criteria in predicting the perceived deservingness of a rarely examined group, single mothers. We conducted a survey in Hungary and compare the responses to direct questions about deservingness to the results of a vignette-based survey experiment in which the deservingness criteria were translated to characteristics of hypothetical mothers. Our results show that in the absence of deservingness cues (direct questions), respondents relied on the attitude, reciprocity/control, identity (measured by traditional family values), and need criteria to the same extent. On the other hand, in the presence of specific deservingness cues (vignette experiment), people disregarded their family values and stereotypes, and the perceived need became the strongest predictor of single mothers’ deservingness. These results support the existence of the deservingness heuristic, however, compared to previous literature that emphasized the role of perceived control and reciprocity of recipients, in the case of single mothers, the deservingness heuristic seems to direct people’s attention to the perception of need.

People in vulnerable situations have the same right as others to participate in public spheres and influence health and welfare services. However, organisations that support these people and promote their interests are essential to their participation. This study investigated how people in vulnerable situations with lived experiences of using public services participate in organisations representing their interests. Fourteen representatives from eight interest organisations were interviewed. The first theme we developed – namely, participation as representatives of the organisations, revealed that a spokesperson’s role is connected to competence and that users of public services rarely obtain such a position. However, people with experience of using public services participate as living examples in external activities, increasing the groups’ visibility through their physical presence and their stories. The second theme was titled participation in organisational activities. The extent to which people with lived experiences participate in formal meetings varies, but they are often consulted by the organisations and attend events and informal gatherings. Notably, people in vulnerable situations interact with and, thus, influence the service-providing organisations. This article discusses the findings in light of representation theory and their implications for practice.

Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.

The system of personal taxation in the United Kingdom is under attack because of the way in which it discriminates between taxpayers on the basis of sex and marital status. Criticisms are allied with proposals for reform, all of which are primarily concerned with the social effects of changing the system. In this paper the various proposals have been categorized under the heads ‘conservative’, ‘radical’, and ‘moderate’ according to the social implications of the changes they advocate. Each set of proposals is discussed and evaluated in terms of revenue costs and savings to the Exchequer and real costs and benefits to the community. The proposals of the recent Green Paper are categorized as conservative and discussed under that head.

Robert Goodin has recently argued that the welfare state increases rather than reduces freedom. This paper examines the meanings of both ‘welfare state’ and ‘freedom’ and argues that the relationship between the two is much more complex than Goodin suggests. The welfare state is seen as a multi-dimensional phenonemon, capable of being defined exclusively or inclusively. Goodin's use of the term ‘freedom’ is unpacked into four distinct components: negative freedom, opportunity, autonomy and moral paternalism. Accordingly, an assessment of the welfare state must include an evaluation of its various programmes, policies and the perceptions of these against separated components of ‘freedom’. It becomes, therefore, on both sides of the analysis a multi-dimensional problem.

Britain’s Household Benefit Cap restricts the amount of benefit income unemployed households can receive. In this article, it is examined using material held at the UK’s National Archives recording debates about a proposal to introduce a similar policy – a benefit limit – in the first Thatcher Conservative government elected in 1979. It was rejected, but the Household Benefit Cap was introduced three decades later. The article locates debates about, and the practice of restricting benefit income, in perennial social security concerns with the financial incentive to do waged work. The article argues that while there are material differences that help explain the different policy outcomes in 1980 and 2010, they can primarily be explained by changing ideas about the roles of social security policy, including the development of the ‘incentive paradigm’ concerned with manipulating behaviour; a loss of concern with the hardship that would come with the introduction of a benefit restriction and a view that institutions other than the state are better placed to address poverty and buttress work incentives.

This article considers the reasons given for the creation of a no-fault compensation scheme for victims of road accidents. In particular the article examines the work of the Royal Commission on Civil Liability and Compensation for Personal Injury and evaluates its proposals by reference to its analysis of whether preferential treatment for road accidents can be justified. The policy options for the future development of welfare provision for the disabled are thereby thrown into sharp relief: each justification given is of relevance to other accident victims; the political nature of the reform is exposed when considering why one particular group is to be preferred to another; and the rationale supporting the existence of the many regimes of compensation in tort and social security is called into question. The role of Commissions in policy making and the structural limitations upon their deliberations are also discussed. In sum the article provides a case study of what has been called ‘the strain of seeking to justify the different treatment for various categories of misfortune’.2

This article discusses significant changes of Japanese occupational pensions since the early 2000s. Our analysis shows that these schemes have been key components of policies to promote private welfare provision and have been highly compatible with human capital investment strategies that are based on long-term employment relationships of regular workers. However, since the 1990s, occupational pensions have come under increased pressure due to underfunding problems caused by depressed stock markets and changes in accounting standards that made these underfunding problems apparent. In response to these challenges, Japanese companies have restructured their occupational pension arrangements. The nature of these efforts can be explained with reference to existing institutional complementarities with the economic system on the one hand and changes in the cost–benefit calculations of employers, employees and the civil service on the other hand. Whereas complementarities, especially with human resource management factors, have ultimately defined the limits of these changes, an actor-centered analysis helps to explain the particular nature of changes within these boundaries.

This article contributes to the growing body of research on social assistance (SA) dynamics by analyzing patterns of SA receipt in China, a middle-income country with a large informal employment sector. Using national low-income household survey data and event history analysis, this study explored the mechanisms underlying exit from Dibao (formally known as Minimum Living Security) and changes in exit probability over time. We found that in the context of an informal economy, the ‘explicit’ change of individual characteristics and employment structure decisively affects receipt duration on the micro and macroeconomic levels, respectively. On the policy level, affected by the informal employment structure, employment services tend to be of low quality and fail to promote Dibao exit effectively. Although the specific Dibao payment strategy, which is used to address the difficulty in means tests, largely curbs the risks of declining working motivation, it considerably increases the possibility of prolonged Dibao use. With this systemic influence of informal employment, a unique pattern of SA receipt characterized by the combination of long-term use and a nondecreasing hazard rate has developed in China.

In the current article, we explore the effect of partners’ workplace characteristics on the take-up and intensity of parental leave by mothers and fathers. We use social security records data from 2004 to 2015 for Luxembourg. The results of the analysis reveal that the probability of taking full-time leave is substantially lower among mothers and fathers working in very small companies than among their counterparts in larger firms, whereas working in a small-sized company is related to higher probability of taking part-time leave. Mothers working in companies in predominantly female-dominated sectors, such as education, health, and social services, are more likely to take parental leave than their counterparts employed in other sectors. With regard to the effect of partners’ workplace characteristics, fathers’ take-up of parental leave is associated with the economy sector of their partner, whereas mothers’ take-up correlates with their partners’ workplace size.

In 2003 the UK government set an objective that in ten years' time Britain's minority ethnic groups should not face disproportionate barriers in the labour market. A key ‘barrier’ is discrimination by employers. This article examines one potential way forward: the use of contract compliance. First, the article presents findings from the authors' study of an innovative use of contract compliance by a group of local authorities in the West Midlands. If contract compliance can be made to work and New Labour is committed to addressing racial inequality in employment, this suggests that contract compliance is an approach that the government should be seeking to develop. The second part of the article therefore considers New Labour's stance on contract compliance, which can be seen to be highly ambiguous. It is argued that if contract compliance is located within the broader context of New Labour policy development, what is apparent is that the professed aspiration for social change is compromised by a dominant commitment to the maintenance of neo-liberal economic policies. The conclusion is that it is likely that only limited progress will be made in achieving racial equality in employment.