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.

The comparative study of housing decommodification lags behind classical welfare state research, while housing research itself is rich in homeownership studies but lacks comparative accounts of private and social rentals due to missing comparative data. Building on existing works and various primary sources, this study presents a new collection of up to forty-eight countries’ social housing shares in stock and new construction since the first housing laws around 1900. The interpolated benchmark time series generally describes the rise and fall of social housing across a residual, a socialist, and a Northern-European housing group. The decline was steeper than for the classical welfare state, but the degree of erosion was surprisingly small in some countries where public housing associations remained resilient. Within the broader housing welfare state, social housing correlates positively with rent regulation and allowances, but negatively with homeownership subsidies and liberal mortgage regulation. A multivariate analysis shows that social housing is rather explained by housing shortages and complementarities with rental and welfare policies than by typical welfare state theories (GDP, political parties). Generally, the paper shows that conventional housing typologies are difficult to defend over time and argues more generally for including housing decommodification in welfare state research.

British employment service delivery has shifted towards a model primed on core ‘workfare’ objectives – that is, enforcing behavioural compliance to work-related duties and expanding participation in work. Nevertheless, significant gaps remain in current knowledge about how workfare is implemented daily by frontline staff. The existing international street-level research on employment service delivery reveals how workers use a range of discretionary practices to achieve workfare objectives. Yet this research largely ignores how, in practice, a key aspect of enforcing behavioural compliance and encouraging work participation is through contending with its opposite – behavioural non-compliance. Analysing 13 interviews with frontline staff, this article contributes to street-level knowledge by revealing the ways managers and workers in British employment services are encouraged to detect and correct variations of claimant non-compliance.

Cross-country research argues that the design of welfare states and social protection systems shapes the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Studies that examine this relationship within a country are however lacking from the literature. Based on a quasi-experimental research design using difference-in-differences estimation and data from the Socio-Economic Panel, I analyse whether the educational disadvantage of children of long-term unemployment assistance recipients increased after changes to eligibility criteria, benefit levels, and conditionality were introduced in Germany in 2005. I find that differences in the probability to enter the academic secondary school track between children of parents receiving long-term unemployment assistance one year before the transition and children of parents not receiving unemployment or social benefits increased by 13 percentage points. In part, this was driven by the introduction of means-testing that changed the composition of unemployment assistance recipients. However, further decreases in the financial conditions of these already disadvantaged families following reductions in benefit levels appear as the main driver of the observed effect. Changes in parental subjective wellbeing due to increased benefit conditionality and stigma do not seem to play a significant mediating role. The findings highlight the important contribution of social policy to social mobility and equality of opportunity.

There is a large discrepancy in European countries between the measured impact of immigration on the welfare state and how this impact is perceived by citizens. This study examines the determinants of individuals’ perception of the impact of immigration on the welfare state. A number of hypotheses at both the individual and contextual level are tested using a multilevel model with data from the European Social Survey. I find that the institutional features of welfare states are associated with different views on the impact of immigration on welfare states: generous contributory social welfare benefits are associated with more favourable attitudes about immigrants, while generous non-contributory benefits, by contrast, are associated with more pessimistic assessments about the fiscal impact of immigration. I argue that this can be because the latter potentially signals to natives that migrants could access generous benefits without any requisite work history. At the individual-level, the results indicate that subjective risk and general opposition to immigration are powerful individual-level predictors: people who feel more economically insecure or who are generally opposed to immigration are more likely to think that it constitutes a burden for the welfare state.

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was one of the rare events that shocked almost every world government simultaneously, thus creating an unusual opportunity to understand how political institutions shape policy decisions. There have been many analyses of what governments did. We focus instead on what they could do, focusing on the institutional politics of agency – how institutions empower rather than how they constrain, and how they affect public policy decisions. We examine public health measures in the first wave (March-September 2020) in Brazil, India, and the U.S. to understand how the interplay of institutions in a complex federal context shaped COVID-19 policy-responses. We find similar patterns of concentrated federal executive agency with limited constraints. In each case, when federal leadership failed public health policy responses, federated, subnational states were left to compensate for these inefficiencies without necessary resources.

The article critically examines the Strategic State approach to social policy as represented by the ‘Scottish Approach’ to policy-making and delivery. The article outlines the defining features of a strategic approach to social policy and critically appraises the Scottish Government’s claim to reflect these principles in flagship welfare reforms. The article considers how far a strategic policy approach has been applied in Scotland and draws upon research exploring the response of local leaders to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic to examine what this experience reveals about how ‘strategic’ these actions were. The article concludes that, in contrast to previous slow progress in implementing a strategic approach, the exigencies of COVID compelled innovations in policy making and accelerated practices consistent with a strategic approach. The article concludes with some reflections on what this evidence implies for strategic social policy making and governance.

This article examines UK newspaper coverage during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic March-August 2020. A qualitative framing analysis of public messaging on age in five high circulation newspapers provides a detailed account of who is deemed to be at risk of dying from COVID-19. Newspapers represent older people as most at risk, with disability as a secondary factor. Reports on who is responsible, who is at risk, and who is to blame for deaths from COVID-19 are framed as issues of public health and generational fairness, with individual responsibility occupying a prominent role. We also find two counter-frames. First, in letters to the editor, older people’s pleas for freedom are framed as a fight for their civil liberties. Second, newspapers praise 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore and frame his behaviour as a source of national pride. We identify this as positive ageism. We conclude that reporting across progressive and conservative newspapers reflects age-based stereotypes and paternalism towards older people. Public figures are represented as scapegoats or heroes, offering distraction from the less newsworthy fact that long-term under-investment in social care increased the risk of dying amongst the old and disabled during the pandemic.

Within growing marketisation of publicly funded services, the internet has provided new opportunities for marketing, delivery, and coordination of those services. Using web scraping and hyperlink network analysis techniques, this paper examines the ways in which organisations operating in Australia’s evolving National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) system inter-connect online. Social media plays the most important role in the online network. Government agencies also play a central role, with many disability service organisations linking their web users to them. Government agency websites do not hyperlink to disability service providers, suggesting that governments do not see their role as assisting access to such services. Advocacy and peak disability organisations are important in online connections between the websites of government and service organisations. Innovative uses of the internet for online brokerage of disability services are evident. The implications of these findings for service delivery are discussed.

Non-take-up, i.e. individuals not applying for a benefit they are eligible for, is a widespread problem limiting the reach of welfare and protection systems. This paper seeks to understand it by means of a theoretical framework comprising two levels of analysis: the claimants’ individual characteristics in relation to the information barriers they face, and the administrative logic and functioning regarding the communications strategy used by public institutions. To test the hypotheses of these two levels of analysis, the paper analyses the B-MINCOME pilot scheme, a cash transfer programme implemented in the city of Barcelona between 2017 and 2019. Findings indicate that, although claimants’ characteristics may play a significant role, the administrative functioning and the communications strategy are fundamental in determining take-up rates. The conclusions briefly address some of the technical and moral concerns raised by non-take-up.

Formal social citizenship is limited in how it enables us to think about informal social citizenship and informal welfare. This informal perspective is important in all contexts where access to social rights is negotiated through local and transnational spaces, and where the state is a relatively minor player. By drawing on work on moral economy (Scott, 1976) and informal welfare (Gough and Wood, 2006) the article aims to propose a new theoretical model to understand the nature and social practice of both informal citizenship and welfare. This model departs from a western-centric understanding of nation-state-based citizenship and national welfare states, adopting instead the perspective that informal social citizenship and welfare have existed independently of the nation state as long as there have been human communities. Formal citizenship together with formal welfare rights represent just one particular crystallization of such informal practice. Our proposed model highlights the interdependent (rather than evolutionary) relationship between formal welfare at national level and informal welfare practices at local and transnational levels.

The discourse of deservingness has been mobilised against certain groups in the UK society navigating UK labour markets, among them refugees and asylum seekers. These discourses, leading to the stigmatisation of the unemployed are coupled with an emphasis on the importance of individuals taking responsibility to develop their ‘employability’. Little attention has been paid to scrutinise the contrast between the deservingness rhetoric and policy making with the actual conditions newcomers, and in particular refugees and asylum seekers, are confronted with when seeking employment. Our paper fills such a gap by indicating key contradictions at the heart of labour market integration in the UK. On the one hand, the emphasis on deservingness is coupled with policy discourses that construct an environment shaped by welfare and labour market chauvinism. On the other hand, the policy architecture is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways in terms of the support mechanisms necessary to ensure that newcomers can successfully integrate into the labour market.

Child protection systems monitoring is key to ensuring children’s wellbeing. In England, monitoring is rooted in onsite inspection, culminating in judgements ranging from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. But inspection may carry unintended consequences where child protection systems are weak. One potential consequence is increased child welfare intervention rates. In this longitudinal ecological study of local authorities in England, we used Poisson mixed-effects regression models to assess whether child welfare intervention rates are higher in an inspection year, whether this is driven by inspection judgement, and whether more deprived areas experience different rates for a given inspection judgement. We investigated the impact of inspection on care entry, Child Protection Plan-initiation, and child-in-need status. We found that inspection was associated with a rise in rates across the spectrum of interventions. Worse judgements yielded higher rates. Inspection may also exacerbate existing inequalities. Unlike less deprived areas, more deprived areas judged inadequate did not experience an increase in the less intrusive ‘child-in-need’ interventions. Our findings suggest that a narrow focus on social work practice is unlikely to address weaknesses in the child protection system. Child protection systems monitoring should be guided by a holistic model of systems improvement, encompassing the socioeconomic determinants of quality.

In liberal welfare systems, social security policy has been increasingly shifting towards conditionality and individualisation (Knotz, 2019). It is within this context that failure to meet the set conditions becomes personal rather than systemic. This has been enabled by policy discourses that construct poverty and unemployment as the result of personal failure and poor social behaviour. While this area of study over emphasises ‘the constraints imposed by discourse’ (Bacchi, 2000: 55), alternative discourses are often developed. This paper draws on ethnographic research investigating the development of self-reliant groups (SRGs) in Scotland. SRGs are small groups of women supporting each other in creating opportunities for personal development. We find that the process of involvement and sharing of experiences between women at the forefront of welfare reform led to the development of a counter public sphere. Yet, the experience doesn’t move fully towards actions for transformative social change.

Although reduced working time and furlough policy initiatives are widely regarded as important for economic and business reasons, little is known about their impacts on workers’ mental health at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Panel Study data from 2018 to February 2020 and April 2020 and change score analysis, this study aims to compare mental health changes between those who worked reduced hours, were furloughed and left/lost paid work. The results suggest that at the onset of COVID-19 reduced working time and furlough can protect workers’ mental health, but only for men not for women. The gender differences remain significant even after controlling for housework and childcare responsibilities at the onset of COVID-19. These results highlight the importance of distributing paid work more equitably and formulating gender-sensitive labour market policies in protection of workers’ mental health.

In this paper, we estimate the causal effects of a set of active labor market programs for male unemployed refugees on welfare who entered Germany between, 2013 and September, 2016. Using rich administrative data, we employ covariate balancing propensity scores combined with inverse probability weighting to estimate effects up to 33 months after the start of treatment. Our results show that relatively short-term training in the form of Schemes by Providers and In-Firm Training, as well as longer-term Further Vocational Training programs have a positive impact on both the employment chances as well as labor market earnings of refugees in the medium run. So-called “One Euro Jobs”, a public employment program, does not yield positive effects on employment or earnings. Sensitivity analyses confirm that our results are unlikely to be driven by unobserved confounding.

Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘super rich’ with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one’s family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants’ own and others’ insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection.

Technological change has squeezed the demand for middle-skill jobs, which typically involve routine-intense tasks. This squeeze has coincided with an increase in the number of part-time working individuals who wish to work more hours. We argue that these two trends are linked. Due to the decline of middle-skill employment, medium-educated workers shift into low-skill employment, increasing the supply of labour for jobs in this segment of the labour market. This pushes those dependent on these jobs to accept part-time jobs, even if these involve fewer hours than they prefer. To empirically assess this claim, we analyse involuntary part-time employment across 16 European countries between 1999 and 2010. Our analysis confirms that a decline in middle-skill employment is associated with an increase in involuntary part-time employment at the bottom end of the labour market. This finding implies that the automation of routine-intense labour worsens employment possibilities in this segment of the labour market. However, we show that training and job creation schemes mitigate this effect. These programmes cushion competition either by providing medium-educated workers with the necessary skills to shift into high-skill jobs or by increasing employment possibilities. Thus, governments have the tools to support workers facing challenges in the knowledge economy.

Old-age poverty in Korea remains exceptionally high among OECD countries despite a significant expansion in pension expenditure. This article presents an institutional explanation for such a puzzle. Using ‘targeting within universalism’ as the analytic framework, this study examines the institutional effects of pension models on old-age poverty in Korea. Firstly, comparative analysis finds that universal provision of pensions negatively affects old-age poverty independent of the expenditure size, identifying Korean pensions as the least universal among OECD countries. Secondly, institutional analysis of the Korean pension system explains why the expenditure growth left a large share of the elderly with no or a partial pension. Finally, microsimulation analysis examines alternative assistance pension models for their potential to alter poverty outcomes. Strikingly, universal models alleviate old-age poverty more cost-effectively than the extant targeting model, questioning the efficiency-based justification for low-income targeting. In particular, the universal floor model appears to be the most effective, allowing greater benefits to the poorer without a means test. Even for assistance benefits, universal models may better remedy poverty under such conditions as low take-up among the needy, prevalence of low-income incidence, and pro-rich distribution of extant social transfers.

Using three waves of data and tracing the same refugees over time, this paper shows that some factors associated with settlement experience are different from life satisfaction. Evidence shows that although settlement experience has not improved over time, life satisfaction of both male and female refugees has. The non-linear effect of age on life satisfaction disappears over time while that of settlement experience lingers on. Discrimination affects both male and female life satisfaction but is only a concern for females and the younger cohort’s settlement experience. Psychological capital did not appear to moderate the discrimination effect, but this needs to be robustly examined further. Lastly, different support for refugees over time and a targeted focus on some groups is likely to be more effective than a blanket support policy.