This article addresses whether responses to COVID-19 created opportunities for future policy change. We explore this matter by presenting a framework rooted in political economy and the literature on pandemics. We argue that the opportunities created by emergency responses are context-specific and that narratives, policy tools, and pro-equity state actors are variables that mediate emergency responses and future opportunities. We ground our analytical contribution on the emergency cash transfers deployed during 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak in two contrasting Central American countries, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The paper promotes further policy discussion on the opportunities for progressive change in unequal contexts.

Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.

Over recent decades it has consistently been shown that disabled adults in the UK fare worse in the labour market and have lower levels of wellbeing than non-disabled adults. However, this is in part due to the selection into dis-ability of those with existing socio-economic disadvantages. In this article, we use panel data from the combined British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society, covering the 27 years from 1991 to 2018, to distinguish between the effect of selection, the effect of dis-ability onset and the effect of dis-ability duration on a range of labour market and wellbeing outcomes. We show that there is important selection both into dis-ability and into longer experience of dis-ability on the basis of observable characteristics. We also show the importance of controlling for time-invariant unobservable individual characteristics that similarly affect selection into dis-ability and duration of dis-ability. Even after controlling for both forms of selection, we find significant negative effects of dis-ability onset and duration, and offer policy solutions to address them.

As climate change progresses, natural hazards are projected to continue to increase in frequency and intensity, posing a new form of social risk, implicating both the welfare and environmental state and raising the salience of ecosocial policy as a mechanism to attend to the distributional effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This study posits a novel conceptual framework for ecosocial policy and offers the US ecosocial safety net as a case analysis. While we conceptualise disaster relief policy as a mode of the environmental state, it includes unique ecosocial policies that constitute the backbone of the US ecosocial safety net. This study describes and compares the developmental and functional synergies between the US welfare and environmental state manifested in the form of an ecosocial safety net by explicating the Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program. Our findings reveal synergies between US disaster relief and welfare, including parallel developmental trends, philosophies of deserving/undeserving, functions of racial capitalism and relationships with economic growth. This study and its conceptual framework of ecosocial policy offer a groundwork for the study of ecosocial policy in other contexts.

Social policies convey normative assumptions about how households should make ends meet and organise care, but how do these ideals withstand crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic? Previous research shows continuity of welfare state models in the crisis, but mostly looked at single policy fields and produced mixed findings regarding the role of pre-crisis reform trajectories. This paper contributes a detailed analysis of assumptions about the ‘standard productive household’ in terms of three dimensions: labour market participation, coverage of economic needs and coverage of care needs. Drawing on original policy documents enacted in 2020 in Germany – which had dismantled many of its institutional strongholds for the male-breadwinner model before the crisis – we provide two novel insights. First, social policy responses to the pandemic were relatively coherent regarding assumptions about labour market participation, but expectations towards households’ abilities to make ends meet and parents’ care involvement were less coherent. In addition to relaxing conditions on stable employment and income, policy responses normalised patchwork incomes and relied on parents to compress paid and unpaid work. Second, we propose that crises may slow down reform processes that are already underway by reverting to ideas that were dominant in the past.

The United Kingdom’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is a framework for identifying potential victims of modern slavery (slavery, servitude, forced labour or human trafficking) and ensuring that they receive adequate care. This research explores differences in referrals and outcomes of potential modern slavery victims within the NRM on the basis of individual attributes, geography and first responder. Findings are based on exploratory analysis of data on 55,000 cases released by the Home Office in spring 2022 plus data from four Freedom of Information requests. Findings confirm that there are significant differences in rates of positive outcomes between native and immigrant groups, with native populations more likely to receive positive conclusive grounds (CG) decisions. Our key contribution is in identification of the role of the first responder in negatively influencing outcomes for victims of particular forms of exploitation. We suggest the differences in outcomes may be explained by the dual role played by first responders within the immigration system in identifying victims and implementing immigration control measures. We situate this finding within a broader critical migration literature on polymorphous borders pointing to the NRM as one mechanism through which bodies are differentially excluded from territorial access and associated rights or benefits.

The social protection of platform workers is considered one of the most precarious features and political challenges of this new form of employment. Still, there have only been a few empirical investigations on this issue to date. This article presents an explorative empirical analysis of the social protection of platform workers in Germany – a conservative welfare regime with a strong link between standard employment and institutionalised social protection. On the basis of an online survey amongst 719 self-employed platform workers, we examine how different employment patterns correspond to institutionalised protection against sickness and old age. We empirically explore different protection types and analyse how they differ regarding working conditions in platform work and individual social policy preferences. Findings reveal that conditions of platform work and social protection as well as demands and regulatory preferences vary notably across different clusters of platform workers. Still, the vast majority votes against obligatory social insurances for platform workers and favours self-employment over dependent employment. Against this background, we discuss challenges for future attempts aiming at improving social protection for platform workers. This study adds to the literature by empirically exploring platform workers’ social protection and social policy preferences, which have been overlooked to date.

Crises create opportunities for policy change, yet the extent to which they encourage redistribution is under-researched. We adopt a narrative approach to study how crisis frames are mobilised to support or oppose redistribution, and whether that redistribution is progressive or regressive. A typology of crisis narratives with different redistributive implications is presented: retrenchment narratives promote deregulation and cuts to welfare; Robin Hood narratives advocate progressive redistribution with expanded rights; and restoration narratives favour bringing back the status quo ex ante. We apply the Narrative Policy Framework to examine how Australian parliamentarians used the language of ‘housing crisis’ during and after COVID-19. Despite existing research suggesting crisis narratives mostly support retrenchment, Australia’s pandemic housing debates were dominated by Robin Hood and restoration narratives. We show that party ideology matters for the redistributive content of crisis narratives, but the effect of ideology is mediated by incumbency status. We conclude that shifts in the parliamentary balance of power lead to changes in political parties’ rhetorical support for redistribution.

Governments around the world have increasingly adopted behavioural public policies, in which behavioural insights units (often designated as ‘Nudge units’) play an increasingly important role. Such units are typically assigned with implementing behavioural insights in various social policy fields. However, research on the contextual specificities of Nudge units is still scarce. This article addresses that gap by providing an in-depth qualitative study of MineduLAB, a Nudge unit active within the Peruvian Ministry of Education. Informed by an interpretive approach, our analysis shows that the behavioural insights that MineduLAB makes use of and develops, are enacted by a unique local interplay of three different dimensions: a political-financial, an epistemic community, and a sector-specific (here: educational) dimension. Moreover, our analysis of a Nudge unit in the Global South showcases both similarities (e.g. focus on behavioural evidence and experimentation) as well as differences (e.g. the challenge of corruption; the deployment of other vocabulary with regards to behavioural insights) with the predominantly Western Nudge units that are more commonly researched. Consequently, we argue that for a profound academic evaluation of behavioural public policy and the role of Nudge units herein, it is crucial to pay close attention to their contextuality and geographical diversity.

A substantial international body of evidence links housing to health outcomes. In 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) evaluated a small selection of policies from its six geographic regions and found that, in Australia as in the rest of the world, existing healthy housing measures fall short of the systemic response required to address health impacts and inequities. This paper takes the novel step of applying Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What is the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach to a wide-ranging thematic analysis of over 300 Australian policies across the domains of health and housing and related policy areas. In so doing, it offers an overview of existing healthy housing policy as well as illuminating the conceptual understandings and priorities of policy makers, shedding light on the policy paradigms that see housing under-utilised as a preventive health and health equity measure.

The UK government has called for employers to make work adaptations in response to changes in health individuals may experience as they age. However, government assumptions place too much emphasis on the voluntary actions of employers and managers, without placing the management of health in a wider context. Drawing on insights from Thompson’s disconnected capitalism thesis, we explore whether financial/competitive pressures facing many private and public sector organisations today, alongside other factors, contribute to organisations not considering or implementing work adaptations. In this context, it is suggested that older workers may also hide health issues because of anxiety, or ‘ontological precarity’, regarding working longer. Qualitative case studies compare the delivery of work adaptations in three organisations: ‘Local Government’, ‘Hospitality’, and ‘Trains’. Work adaptations were only widely available in Trains; this was for a range of reasons, including the fact that Trains was relatively insulated from financial pressures and able to deliver job and financial security for older workers. As many older workers will continue to be employed by organisations similar to Local Government and Hospitality, we argue that policy makers cannot rely solely on employers to make adaptations.

Multiple welfare states are re-emphasising the need for street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) discretion to stimulate responsive service provision. However, little is known about how SLBs with diverse backgrounds in inter-departmental settings deliberate what it means to use discretion well when different rules, eligibility criteria, and interpretations apply to a client. We address this gap by investigating the stories that participants of a Dutch policy experiment told each other to justify which clients should be granted a flexible interpretation of entitlement categories amid scarcity. We found that ‘caretakers’ used the ‘victim of circumstances’ and ‘good citizen’ plot-type to convince ‘service providers’ that the use of discretion was the right thing to do, whereas the latter used the ‘not needy enough’ or ‘the irresponsible citizen’ plot-type for contestation. Our analysis shows that storytelling helped SLBs to make sense of and bring cohesion to complex situations. Moreover, the analysis shows how stories can have a strong emotional appeal and create a sense of urgency to act collectively, yet can also create divisions and opposition among SLBs. As such, storytelling influences how SLBs think and feel about the client, themselves, and each other, and influences how discretion is used at the front-line of public policy.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both viral infection and the corresponding economic turmoil have wreaked havoc across the globe, highlighting the imperative function of the state as a social protection provider. The pandemic has seemingly created favourable political circumstances for rapidly expanding social protection, but its influences on public welfare attitudes remain unclear. In this study, I argue that the impact of pandemic-driven economic risk is too limited to spur strong public support for social protection. The employed empirical analyses using panel data collected in South Korea show that unemployment induced by the pandemic is conducive to higher degrees of individual support for social protection measures, but the impact is only short-lived. Further analyses show that, once individuals are re-employed and as the time spent in economic difficulties becomes more distant, personal unemployment experiences are no longer positively associated with support for social protection. Finally, pandemic-induced unemployment experiences have a lasting impact primarily on young adults. The evidence therefore suggests that significant institutional changes in the welfare state are hard to achieve by solely relying on the impact of economic risk.

Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. This article addresses this empirical and conceptual gap by drawing on administrative burdens literature to analyse empirical data from forty-four interviews with UC recipients. We conclude by highlighting three costs: temporal, financial, and emotional. These costs illustrate the political dimensions of technical features of UC, as they affect accountability procedures and paths to legal entitlements that have bearings on certain claimants’ rights.

Globally, women experience poverty at disproportionate rates to men, with the situation being worse for Indigenous women and women of colour. Social security systems are one avenue for income redistribution that can alleviate poverty. However, such systems are themselves embedded within and produced by unequal social relations, meaning they can also serve to perpetuate and exacerbate social inequalities. This is exemplified under neoliberal welfare reforms, which have disproportionate negative impacts for women across the world (e.g. increased poverty and stigma, reduced health/wellbeing, and more). Again, this is particularly the case for Indigenous women and women of colour.

In this article, we offer an intersectional feminist analysis of an intensive form of neoliberal welfare conditionality, Australia’s ‘compulsory income management’ program (CIM). CIM quarantines social security incomes onto cashless bank cards to restrict expenditure to ‘approved’ items. Drawing on interviews and surveys with 170 individuals who have personally experienced CIM, we show that it has myriad negative impacts that are especially borne by (Indigenous) women. These are not, we argue, unintended policy impacts, but are instead symptomatic of the gendered and racialised violence that is woven into patriarchal capitalism more broadly. Thus, the experience of CIM holds lessons for welfare states internationally.

Social investment can act as an empowering funding mechanism that could activate the economic agency of marginalised people while addressing their social needs. Nonetheless, political agendas might cause divergence in the achievement of social investment’s potential benefits. To develop our understanding in this area, this paper aims to extract discursive policy framings of social investment by comparing the UK and Scottish Government policies to identify the use of social investment and its implications on social innovation. Using corpus linguistic methods that allows for a framing analysis, the paper’s findings are twofold. Firstly, both the UK and Scottish Governments share similarities in the framing of social investment policy, especially in the proclivity towards the privatisation of social welfare delivery using market mechanisms. Secondly, the governments differ in their intensity of conviction for social investment which creates divergent implications for social innovation practice in the countries.

The economic shock of the Covid-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted small businesses and the self-employed. Around the globe, their survival during the pandemic often relied heavily on government assistance. This article explores how economic relief to business is understood through the lens of deservingness in the public. It examines the case of Germany, where the government has responded to the pandemic by implementing an extensive support programme. Notably, in this context, the self-employed are typically outsiders to the state insurance system. Combining computational social science methods and a qualitative analysis, the article focuses on the debate about direct subsidies on the social media platform Twitter/X between March 2020 and June 2021. It traces variation in the patterns of claim making in what is a rich debate about pandemic state support, finding that this discourse is characterised by the concern that economic relief threatens to blur existing boundaries of worth in society. The reciprocity principle of deservingness theory is pivotal in asserting business identities in times of crisis, yet it also reveals a fundamentally ambiguous relationship with the principle of need. Additionally, the claim of justice-as-redress, as a novel dimension of reciprocity, surfaces as an important theme in this debate.

Research on the relationship between performance and trust is commonplace in social sciences, yet trust in child protection systems (CPS) remains an emerging area of study. This research delves into how three dimensions of performance – distributive justice, procedural fairness, and functional effectiveness – affect trust in CPS in England and Norway, drawing insights from organisational and social psychology literature. A cross-sectional survey collected data from 981 individuals in England and 1,140 in Norway. Results suggest that procedural fairness and the competences indicator of functional effectiveness significantly and positively impact trust in CPS in both countries. Resources significantly influence trust in Norway’s CPS, while distributive justice has no impact on trust in either country’s CPS. These findings hold theoretical and practical implications for trust in CPS.

Marginalisation is a multilevel phenomenon in society depriving people from essential rights, resources, and opportunities. Street-outreach services in the Netherlands, like social street work (SSW), support these marginalised people in fostering their participation in society as an answer to their marginalised position in society. We followed 927 clients in SSW over an eight-month period. Clients filled in a questionnaire at three timepoints. We examined whether clients’ perceived belongingness, self-esteem, strengths, and informal support (outcome measures) were associated with the working relationship, over time. Results showed the establishment of a working relationship with clients at all three timepoints. An evolving working relationship was associated with an increase in clients’ perceived belongingness, self-esteem, strengths, and informal support over time. This study showed the ability of workers to establish a working relationship with clients in their living environment and underscored the necessity of establishing a working relationship in street-outreach services to foster clients’ participation in society. This study encourages policymakers to reflect on current street-outreach services, to deviate from demanding short-term and measurable results from professionals’ efforts, and to opt for a better fit between performance and financing conditions and daily practices of street-outreach services.

Policies for recipients of basic income support for jobseekers in Germany focus on activation and quick labour market integration. Yet, the majority of benefit recipients report severe health impairments. Against this background, the article investigates implications of health impairments for benefit recipients’ jobcentre relationship and employment opportunities. The analyses show that 63 per cent of non-employed benefit recipients report health restrictions on their employment capabilities, 51 per cent report severe health impairments, and 25 per cent that they cannot work at all. The most frequent types of health impairments are musculoskeletal and mental health impairments. Health impairments significantly reduce entry rates into socially insured employment, but do not seem to inhibit taking up uninsured minijobs. Counselling frequency increases job entry rates for benefit recipients without health impairments in the short-term. For those with health impairments, no short-term effects are found over a one-year follow-up period. Policy responses could include a more explicit acknowledgement of health impairments as a central issue for benefit recipients. Greater investments in rehabilitation and subsidised employment could be part of a strategy to improve opportunities for benefit recipients with health impairments to find better-quality (part-time) employment instead of uninsured minijobs. The analyses are based on linked longitudinal PASS survey and administrative data.