Inspectors are the executing branch of state regulation. Existing literature focuses on their tasks and operations, mostly with regard to their commitments to the state and their complex relations with inspectees. The present study explores a heretofore-unexamined issue: the playing out of inspection in a sociopolitical context of national conflict and discriminatory majority-minority relations. Namely, it focuses on the work of inspectors of social services overseen by the Israeli welfare state but provided by local or contracted agencies, offered to one of the country’s most oppressed and marginalized populations: Arab-Palestinian young women. The research was based on interviews with 25 national and district inspectors in the field of services for young women in Israel, and reveals numerous barriers hindering effective inspection, resulting from having to inspect the implementation of universalist policy in a context of local needs; and the implementation of welfare policy in a context of national sociopolitical inequality. This is discussed in terms of the severe toll that color-blind and gender-blind policy can have on the feasibility of enforcing regulation, and on the potential to ensure that Arab-Palestinian young women receive adequate social services.

Despite the large body of ALMP evaluations focussing on isolated training programmes for unemployed jobseekers, our understanding of potential reasons for (in)effectiveness remains limited. Specific training programmes aim to remediate particular supply- or demand-side barriers to employment experienced by targeted jobseekers. Consequently, this study unpacks training into four different types: (I) general classroom training (GCT) to enhance motivation and job search skills, (II) occupation-specific classroom training (OCT) addressing gaps in human capital, (III) non-contractual workplace training (NCWT) combining human capital acquisition with workplace experience, and (IV) contractual workplace training (CWT) additionally including a temporary wage subsidy to reduce hiring costs for employers. Using large-scale longitudinal register data, dynamic propensity score matching, and hazard models indicate positive effects of OCT participation, and particularly NCWT programmes allowing human and social capital accumulation in a workplace setting, on the transition into (stable) regular employment. In contrast, the non-effects for GCT participants highlight the need for more follow-up programmes, and the fact that, after controlling for the selective recruitment by employers of unemployed jobseekers with relatively strong profiles, CWT programme participants show moderate, short-lived positive effects which might inspire policymakers to reconsider programme assignment in light of cream-skimming by employers.

First, we employ a methodology that decomposes the change in poverty into changes due to the means and variances of market and transfer incomes and to other factors which affect the shape of the income distribution. We then briefly describe the Reagan economic programme. Finally, we estimate a regression model that reflects changes in these moments of the income distribution to changes in the unemployment rates and to the Reagan programme. The regression estimates, together with the poverty rate decomposition, allow us to show that the administration's cuts in income-transfer programmes account for about 40 per cent of the recent rise in poverty and that increased unemployment accounts for about a third of the increase in poverty.

‘Value pluralism’ is a strand of analytical philosophy that posits the plurality of morally significant values. By enabling systematic mapping of the diversity of moral registers within which social policy concerns might legitimately be considered, we contend that value pluralist-inspired analysis can aid constructive policy dialogue. Our argument is founded on four claims: first, as a matter of normative principle, value pluralism represents a defensible ethical standpoint; second, as a matter of fact, people are attracted to a plurality of moral values; third, as a matter of democratic legitimacy, pluralism offers a means of (partially) reconciling rival moral claims; fourth, as a matter of political strategy, pluralism offers a pragmatic approach that can engage protagonists on their own terms. To demonstrate its efficacy, we apply this pluralist approach to the vexed question of welfare conditionality, which we interrogate via six normative perspectives (rights, utilitarianism, contractualism, communitarianism, paternalism and social justice).

Readers will be aware that one of the Journal of Social Policy's regular features, the Social Policy Digest, is being relaunched as a web-based publication.

Previous studies have documented that crisis trends are associated with negative changes in healthcare satisfaction. Yet, most research has focused on the role of self-interest and little is known about the ideological dimension of these changes. The article investigates this underexplored topic by examining the ideological divide in satisfaction with healthcare in two countries strongly hit by the recent economic crisis, Portugal and Ireland. The results of the empirical analysis based on the European Social Survey data from 2008 to 2015 show that ideology played a role in shaping healthcare satisfaction in both countries. In Portugal, healthcare satisfaction declined more for the left- than for the right-oriented, while in Ireland the right-oriented demonstrated a stronger decline in satisfaction than the left-oriented. In addition, the results identify an interaction between ideology and self-interest, showing that ideology trumps self-interest among the low income, but the opposite is true among the high income groups. Overall, these findings suggest that there is a substantive ideology-driven dimension in public satisfaction with health systems and point to the need for theoretical integration of different approaches in the analysis of healthcare attitudes in the crisis context.