In recent decades, many European governments have passed pension reforms to incentivise participation in private pension plans. However, we still have minimal understanding of whether participation in such plans is concentrated in certain groups or spread uniformly across society, or what their stability over time is. To illuminate the social selectivity of these plans and potential changes in that selectivity over time, we analyse six waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) in ten European countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Specifically, we focus on participation gaps in individual and occupational plans of workers across six dimensions: gender, education, age, social class, income, and risk preference. The results indicate large and persistent social divides in participation rates. As expected, rates are significantly higher among workers who are not close to retirement, those with an upper service occupation and those with high income. Importantly, these divides did not shrink significantly over the period considered – 2006 to 2021. Social selectivity is not consistently smaller in contexts of more mature private pension provision, whereas it is consistently smaller in countries with more generous public pensions.

In international comparative research, significant advances have been made in the study of the effect of social capital and the welfare state on subjective well-being (SWB). However, few studies have examined how the welfare state influences the impact of social capital on SWB. To fill this gap, from the perspectives of the crowding-out and crowding-in hypotheses, this study explores whether welfare provisions alter the role of three dimensions of social capital – namely, social trust, formal social contact, and informal social contact, in SWB. The present study utilises international comparative data from nine waves of the European Social Survey of 2002 to 2019 and a two-way fixed-effects model to evaluate the cross-level interaction effects of welfare provisions and the three dimensions of social capital on SWB. This analysis reveals that welfare spending strengthens the positive association between social capital and SWB.

The following acknowledgement was omitted from the original publication:

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the BBSRC (The Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council) for the funding of IKnowFood at York which is 4-year research programme being funded through the Global Food Security-Food System Resilience programme with contributions from BBSRC, ESRC, NERC, and the Scottish Government.

The authors apologise for this oversight.

Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that, on top of many other benefits, it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential poverty-reducing impact of BI strongly depends on exactly how and where it is implemented. Implementing a BI requires far more choices than advocates seem to realise. The level at which a BI is set matters, but its exact specification matters even more. The impact of a BI, be it a low or a high one, also strongly depends on the characteristics of the system that it is (partially) replacing or complementing, as well as the socio-economic context in which it is introduced. Some versions of BI could potentially help to reduce poverty but always at a significant cost and with substantial sections of the population incurring significant losses, which matters for political feasibility. A partial BI complementing existing provisions appears to make more potential sense than a full BI replacing them. The simplicity of BI, however, tends to be vastly overstated.

Young people experience different treatment compared to older adults in the English welfare and homelessness systems, encountering varying levels of protection and disadvantage. This paper uses a value-pluralist perspective to explore the normative rationales for and the ethical defensibility of these policy differences. Evidence from 38 key informant interviews suggests that the English homelessness system is shifting towards a vulnerability-oriented response to young people. But an inconsistent value framework within the welfare system systematically disadvantages them without offering a corresponding degree of protection. As such, these closely-connected areas of social policy pull in opposing directions. Although individual positions targeting young people may (to greater and lesser extents) be justifiable, this disparity in values creates an incoherent and indefensible welfare policy landscape for this group.

This article is an attempt to create a general theoretical model or ‘scale’ for categorizing voluntary organizations chiefly concerned with social service provision. Consumer participation, which the author believes has positive and particular advantages in voluntary organizations, is taken as one element in the categorization. He discusses what participation may or should mean, and the reasons why it is so rarely found. Where it exists it tends to involve the participation of staff rather than ‘clients’, which may result in more discussion than action. The article also discusses how an organization's position on the ‘scale’ can change. Voluntary organizations which start out as small, highly-participating, self-help organizations tend to become more elitist and altruistic with success and growth. The author suggests that organizations with a higher degree of consumer participation may be more responsive to social change and its consequences, more flexible and even more cost-effective than more traditionally organized institutions and may also be better able to take advantage of the independence afforded only to voluntary organizations in an increasingly state-dominated society.

Contemporary welfare policies in many Western countries limit means tested public assistance for the long-term unemployed and spur rapid movement into the labor market. Studies on welfare use determinants that traced these policy changes focused on individuals’ characteristics, economic condition, and various policy components. Little attention was paid to welfare recipients’ job quality or its role in determining welfare exit. The present study examined the contribution of various job quality aspects, beyond wages, to welfare exit among welfare recipients in Israel. We considered the use of workers’ own skills and occupation, existence of standard employment contract (versus temporary), irregular work schedule, and application of mandatory and non-mandatory non-wage compensation attributes. The data derive from a national panel survey of 2,800 single-mother recipients of welfare in 2003. The results indicate the importance of these job components for welfare exit, above and beyond wages. Implications for policy are discussed.

This article is concerned with the extent to which systems of public welfare can be said to have reduced or enlarged personal freedom. It looks, first of all, at the kind of arguments which have been advanced both in support of, and against, the notion of ‘the Welfare State’ as a defender or promoter of individual liberty. Secondly, it examines some of the freedoms which are said to have been threatened or enhanced, including ‘freedom of choice’, ‘freedom of disposition’ and ‘freedom of action’. Finally, it argues that many of these are ‘secondary’ freedoms, contingent upon the primary condition of freedom from economic need. Following Roosevelt we conclude that ‘true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence’ and that, although public welfare may have been partly responsible for an overall ‘levelling-up’ of freedoms, the distribution of such freedoms still reflects inequalities of income, status and power.