The minimum wage is often considered a social policy instrument that can help reduce both poverty and welfare receipt. The introduction of the statutory minimum wage in Germany in 2015 provides an interesting case study to analyse not only the potential but also the limitations of minimum wages as an instrument to achieve socially desirable goals such as reduced welfare receipt or poverty. Based on the results of simulation models, descriptive analyses and causal effects studies of the short-term effects, we argue that minimum wages are a rather badly targeted measure when attempting to reduce poverty and welfare receipt.

Policy driven change is challenging, with a significant gap between theory and practice. A key tension in enacting such change is achieving a balance between bottom-up development of local, context-specific approaches, and top-down, centrally determined policy solutions and their mutual sequencing. Ideal type models of the policy-making process envisage a rational ordered approach, driven by evidence and accompanied by ongoing evaluation of outcomes (Parsons, 1995, p77); however, the reality is far more complex. We examine the implementation and early operation of the New Care Models (NCM) Vanguard programme in England, using Matland’s (1995) ambiguity-conflict model, to explore the aims and expectations of the programme. We consider the relationship between top-down and bottom-up approaches to policy development and draw attention to the pressures coming from what was initially perceived as a permissive policy approach of encouraging experimentation, whilst also requiring rapid learning, scale and spread. We suggest that future programmes for large-scale policy implementation initiatives could be crafted differently to take account of the environment of implementation and render ambitions more realistic. Rather than aiming to create a set of definite products and templates, it may be that a set of principles for design and implementation should be developed and spread.

Austerity is frequently associated with crisis-enabled spending cuts. What happens when the crisis is over? This article’s original contribution lies in its in-depth exploration of one mechanism that help explain austerity’s endurance post-crisis, when state elites face increased popular resistance and pressure to reinstate social spending. This mechanism calls attention to the role of economists in Central Budgeting Offices as agents of technocratization and de-politicization within social policy domains. These economists may institute an austere spending mode by changing social spending’s norms and instruments. To demonstrate economists’ role in mediating macroeconomic fiscal goals and social policy design over time, the article examines the development of child welfare policy in Israel before, during and in the aftermath of economic crisis. In this case, austerity attained hegemony when economists were able to delegitimize and shelve an ‘irresponsible’ social spending proposal – and in response to post-crisis demands for compensation – introduce an austere policy instrument to cap social spending during a period of social policy expansion. This analysis suggests that scholars regard relations between austerity and social spending as dialectical.

Housing allowances within the UK’s welfare system help protect low-income households from eviction. Universal Credit (UC) has faced criticism for threatening this with its long wait periods, increased conditionality and monthly direct payments. However, there is currently a lack of robust, national-level quantitative analysis on UC’s housing security impacts. This article addresses this, exploiting cross-area variation in the timing of UC rollout to assess its impact on landlord repossession rates within 323 English local authorities. A fixed-effects panel design was used, linking data from UC’s rollout schedule with Ministry of Justice data on legal repossession actions from 2012 Q1 - 2019 Q1. Results suggest that UC ‘Full Service’ rollout, on average, led to an increase of 1.74 landlord repossession claims, 1.42 landlord repossession orders and 0.70 landlord repossession warrants within local authorities (per 10,000 rented dwellings). This corresponds to a 4–5 percent increase on pre-rollout rates. UC’s impact tended to increase the longer it had been rolled out. Where ‘Full Service’ had been rolled out for 12+ months, it led to an increase of 2.60 landlord repossession claims, 2.89 landlord repossession orders and 1.09 landlord repossession warrants (per 10,000 rented dwellings), corresponding to a 6–10 percent increase on pre-rollout rates.

Equal access to childcare services is a key concern of childcare policy. This article analyses social inequalities in the availability of such services. We explore how observed disparities are related to the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods and investigate how different provider types contribute to such differences. To do so, we use data on all childcare centres in the city of Vienna, Austria, on the spatial distribution of children aged under six and on three measures of neighbourhood status, over a period of eight years. We find that spatial accessibility is highest in neighbourhoods with the highest socio-economic status, that such inequality has increased over time and that both effects can be attributed to the role of non-profits. The results indicate that the policy change undertaken in Vienna towards increased communitarisation – that is, a shift towards non-profit provision – has undermined the universal character of the city’s childcare system.

Australia’s welfare-to-work system has been subject to ongoing political contestation and policy reform since the 1990s. In this paper we take a big picture look at the Australian system over time, re-visiting our earlier analysis of the impact of marketisation on flexibility at the frontline over the first ten years of the Australian market in employment services. That analysis demonstrated that marketisation had failed to deliver the service flexibility intended through contracting-out, and had instead produced market herding around a common set of standardised frontline practices. In the interim, there have been two further major redesigns of the Australian system at considerable expense to taxpayers. Re-introducing greater flexibility and service tailoring into the market has been a key aim of these reforms. Calling on evidence from an original, longitudinal survey of frontline employment service staff run in 2008, 2012 and 2016, this paper considers how the Australian market has evolved over its second decade. We find remarkable consistency over time and, indeed, evidence of deepening organisational convergence. We conclude that, once in motion, isomorphic pressures towards standardisation quickly get locked into quasi-market regimes; at least when these pressures occur in low-trust contracting environments.

This paper looks at rights in practice to understand how migrant EU citizens’ formal social rights translate into substantive ones. It highlights a factor thus far overlooked in the literature on welfare states and migrants’ social rights: namely, the actors involved in welfare delivery. The argument is based, first, on non-profit organisations’ (NPOs) function as ‘rights intermediaries’; and second, on the distinct make-up of the ‘welfare mix’ across countries, with which NPO’s role in the provision of services, and hence their capacities and autonomy, varies. Focusing on EU citizens’ cross-border social rights, and drawing on in-depth research in Germany and Sweden, the paper reveals how NPOs defend and facilitate access to rights in both countries. Yet NPOs’ extensive role in the German welfare sector generates greater capacities for NPOs to pursue inclusive objectives than what is available to their Swedish counterparts, which occupy a much more limited position as welfare providers. This, it is argued, can be important for understanding how boundaries of social citizenship are drawn in each country.

This study contributes to the international literature on welfare dynamics, by providing a differentiated picture of paths through the means-tested Basic Income for recipients who are capable of working, after the reorganisation of the basic income system in Germany in 2005. We analyse the employment and benefit trajectories of individuals who became recipients for the first time between 2007 and 2009 by methods of sequence and cluster analysis based on representative administrative individual data. We find a significant polarisation between long-term recipients and those with an early exit from benefit receipt via full-time employment. One in three new recipients remains in benefit receipt for the next years and shows almost no employment activities. Approximately 23 percent leave benefit receipt quickly and work in full-time employment. Several other different paths exist between these two poles. These heterogeneous trajectories should be characteristic for broad basic income systems and require a variety of policies that in part are beyond labour market policies.

Evaluation studies of active labour market policy show different activation measures generate contradictory results. In the present study, we argue that these contradictory results are due to the fact that the outcomes of activation measures depend on other institutions. The outcome measure in this study is the long-term unemployment rate. Two labour market institutions are of special interest in this context: namely, employment protection and unemployment benefits. Both institutions, depending on their design, may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of active labour market policies in lowering long-term unemployment. Based on an analysis of macro-level data on 20 countries over a period of 16 years, our results show that employment protection strictness and unemployment benefit generosity interact with the way in which active labour market policies relate to long-term unemployment. Our results also indicate that, depending on the measure used, active labour market policies fit either in a flexible or in a coordinated labour market. This suggests that active labour market policies can adhere to both institutional logics, which are encapsulated in different types of measures.

Proceeding population aging might fuel generational conflicts about the distribution of welfare state resources in the future, but the existing evidence on the extent of generational cleavages in attitudes towards the welfare state is mixed. We argue that these mixed findings are partially related to an underestimation of trade-offs on the level of individual preferences. Using novel data from a survey experiment conducted in eight Western European countries, we show that age-related self-interest is an important determinant of social policy preferences. When elderly respondents are confronted with hypothetical cutbacks in pensions, they are much less likely to support additional education spending. However, we also find evidence for a mediating effect of social trust: high-trusting elderly individuals are more likely to support education spending – contrary to their narrow self-interest – than low-trusting elderly.

Sweden is often considered a forerunner in family change and developments towards less gendered family production patterns. In this study, we focus on recent developments towards more gender-equal sharing of parental leave in Sweden. We explore how fathers’ use of parental leave has changed over time before and since the turn of the century. As the parental leave benefit is individual and earnings-based, we examine how fathers’ individual socio-economic and demographic characteristics are associated with their parental leave uptake over time, to determine whether there are forerunners and laggards in recent family change. Multinomial logistic regression models were applied to data from national registers. Our study demonstrates a bifurcation in trends in recent decades. This is associated with the extension of reforms that reserve part of the leave for fathers, the so-called “daddy months”, but stretches beyond the impact of any such reforms. Taking a long leave of over two months was pioneered by better-educated residents of metropolitan areas and surrounding suburbs, as well as Swedish-born fathers. Young fathers, low-income earners and foreign-born fathers lagged behind in these developments. We regard the unstable labour market situation of the latter as a contributing factor in widening social inequalities in family-related behaviour.

Although the German economy managed the last economic recession comparatively well, it suffers from high and stagnating long-term unemployment and benefit receipt. This article is the first to study the duration and determinants of welfare benefit (“unemployment benefit II”) receipt in Germany as a whole, with special attention on duration dependence. The recipients of the means-tested household benefit are not necessarily registered as unemployed, but are, for example, employed with insufficient earnings, in training measures or economically inactive. Due to the heterogeneous situations of welfare recipients, separately studying welfare receipt and unemployment is necessary. By using exceptionally rich administrative data on a 1% random sample of welfare recipients from between 2005 and 2014, we estimate discrete-time hazard rate models that control for unobserved heterogeneity. The first benefit and unemployment episodes for first welfare recipients between 2006 and 2012 (n = 26,163) are traced monthly until 31 December 2014. Recipients leave unemployment more quickly than welfare. Sociodemographic characteristics, labour market resources and the duration seem to affect both processes. Household composition is less important for leaving unemployment than for leaving welfare. Overall, the results indicate that leaving unemployment and leaving welfare receipt are two different processes that need distinct policies.

Despite the increased attention paid to federal-state unemployment insurance (UI) schemes after the Great Recession (2007–2009), research examining the policy characteristics and the underlying logic shaping the social protection provided by a federal-state UI system is limited. Integrating the perspectives of policy design theory, comparative welfare politics, and fiscal welfare, this paper examines the unequal social protection under the American UI system during and after the Great Recession. By using model-based cluster analysis and fixed-effect panel regression models, this paper identifies three distinct UI approaches, i.e. the limited social protection approach, the unbalanced social protection approach, and the balanced social protection approach. The policy choices made by those states that follow the three approaches reflect different mixtures of policy logic, including social protection, economic stabilization, work disincentives, and interstate competition. The overall downward trend in social protection signals that the American UI system is under-prepared for the next economic recession, thereby exposing unemployed workers to the risk of economic insecurity. These findings provide implications for future policy designs aiming to strengthen the social protection of the federal-state UI system.

How do political leaders politicise welfare state “reform pressures”, e.g. unemployment, ageing or globalisation, in election campaigns? Competing expectations range from no politicization at all to a clear and unbiased coupling between pressures and intended policy responses. Eighteen speeches held by prime ministerial candidates at election-year party congresses in Germany, Norway and Sweden (2000–2010) reveal an unfinished and biased problem-solution coupling. On the one hand, even in these affluent countries pressures are frequently politicised. On the other hand, leaders either cherry-pick less painful policy solutions, or refrain altogether from debating them. So, while citizens learn that the welfare state is pressured, they are not exposed to the full range of policies they increasingly have reason to expect after elections.

The emergence of and reaction to policy scandals has been usefully studied through comparative case studies. Far less attention has been devoted, however, to the study of such scandals in long-term historical context. With the aim of illuminating longer-term social processes which shape the likelihood that (health)care scandals emerge, we delineate three areas where such changes are visible: a) changing formats of social relations and emotions within and around care provision, and thereby understandings of and demands for compassionate care; b) heightened organisational and political sensitivity to failings; and c) changes in media reporting on healthcare failings, as well as in policy-makers’ responsiveness to and manipulation of media. We consider the 2013 Mid Staffordshire scandal in the English National Health Service and the extant policy literature on this scandal to help illuminate the added analytical value of our long-term approach. In the final section we explore the interconnection of the three processes and how longer-term approaches open up new vistas for policy analysis.

Using rich administrative data on unemployed welfare recipients in Germany and propensity score matching, the author analyses the effects of participating in four major active labour market programmes (ALMPs) on various dimensions of job quality. In Germany, welfare recipients may suffer from poor job quality because they are forced to accept any reasonable job offer. However, few studies consider the effects of participation in ALMPs on job quality. The results imply that participation in a programme not only increases the probability of taking jobs but also increases the probability of holding a high-quality job for some dimension of job quality. In particular, further vocational training is very effective in terms of job quality for West German women. Thus, job centres should focus on the activation of unemployed welfare recipients.

Employment subsidy programs have experienced considerable expansion across Europe in recent decades. To date, most studies analyzing this policy shift have assumed that these programs are largely equivalent in terms of their designs, effects, and explanations. In contrast, this article argues that employment subsidies are best understood as versatile multi-purpose tools that can be used as means to rather different distributional ends. Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis to explore novel data from hundreds of employment subsidy programs across Europe, this article develops a new typology based on two overarching trade-offs. The typology highlights that employment subsidies may be designed to counteract as well as to sustain insider/outsider divides in the labor market, and that they may be designed to tackle either structural or cyclical labor market problems. In a first empirical evaluation of the typology, programs with different designs are found to vary systematically in terms of distributional outcomes and starting conditions.

This article explores the moral politics of the welfare state and the social conflicts that underlie them. We argue that existing research on the moralism of redistributive and social policy preferences is overly one-dimensional, with a longstanding concentration on attitudes toward welfare state beneficiaries. To widen our understanding of the phenomenon, we introduce the concept of motive attribution: that is, how people answer the question “what drives others to take the positions that they hold?” Doing so allows us to shift the subject of moralistic attitudes, with a move toward uncovering what citizens think of those who hold a given social policy stance. The article then lays out a first systematic overview of motive attributions using an original dataset built from nationally representative surveys conducted in ten Western democracies. Comparing responses across these countries, we draw out important cross-national differences in ascribed motives, including within welfare state regime types.

Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors – state, market, family/households, employers and charities – but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this ‘welfare mix’ require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people’s views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime theory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also introduces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, but risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Germany and the UK. We collected data using deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people’s justifications for their attitudes. Our research indicated patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people’s justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in attitudes are resilient.

This article investigates to what extent austerity-oriented measures introduced in the Portuguese health sector during the recent economic crisis were associated with changes in the public opinion on healthcare. We conducted multivariate regression analyses of cross-sectional, biannual data from the European Social Survey (2002–2015) for 13,271 individuals living in private households in Portugal. In line with our expectations, healthcare evaluations of the general population improved until 2010 but declined with the implementation of comprehensive austerity measures introduced under the Memorandum of Understanding after 2011. Healthcare evaluations of vulnerable social groups – older and retired individuals, individuals with poor health, low income and education – declined particularly strongly. In addition, differences in healthcare evaluations between more and less vulnerable social groups were more pronounced after 2011. Interestingly, healthcare evaluations of the general population and of some of the most vulnerable groups ‘recovered’ in 2015, when most of the Memorandum measures were implemented. Our findings contribute to the literature on the effects of austerity measures on welfare attitudes and stress the need to analyse the differential impact of crisis-induced welfare state reforms across social groups.