The COVID-19 pandemic presents a unique opportunity to study how humans allocate scarce resources in times of hardship. We study public preferences regarding who should get access to government aid for the self-employed, a bed in the intensive care unit, and permission to cross the border using original conjoint survey experiments administered to an incentivised online panel in Switzerland during the first and second waves of the pandemic in 2020. We find that across the three areas, even in extraordinary circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic, evaluations of deservingness to aid and support are still based on an underlying logic of conditional solidarity and identity: in all experiments, contributing to the community, be it through past actions and contributions or through current efforts, plays a crucial role in determining an individual’s deservingness, as does their nationality (and legal status) with nationals being perceived as more deserving than non-nationals.

Many countries have taken steps to address employment insecurity by enacting employment protection legislation (EPL) for non-regular workers. Although the aggregate impacts of EPL reforms have been examined in the literature, less attention has been paid to the heterogeneous ways that different types of employers respond to these reforms. In this paper, we seek to shed additional light on the impact of non-regular workforce protections by investigating the response of establishments to legal changes in Korea in 2007. We employ a difference-in-difference framework to explore which establishment characteristics predict that employers will convert non-regular workers to regular status. Results indicate that, in the short term, the Korean labor reforms led to increased conversions of fixed-term workers to permanent status. Establishments that have shifted risk onto workers via the use of performance pay are more likely to extend permanent status to non-regular workers. However, establishments that provide favorable employment conditions were less likely to convert. Unions play a double-edged role. Unions in large establishments with a wide range of occupational categories are associated with relatively greater conversion of outsiders to regular status, while unions in smaller, more resource-constrained establishments with a narrower occupational focus are associated with more exclusionary behavior.

Employer engagement is increasingly emphasised in the context of efforts to bring more disadvantaged people into work. A new approach in the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Service (NAV) combines demand-side and supply-side measures in a ‘combined workplace-oriented approach’. Through qualitative interviews with frontline staff – including job coaches following the Supported Employment (SE) method – the paper examines the intermediary role of the street-level organisation (SLO) through the targeted use of SE methods directed at young users and employers. The findings suggest that young users are ‘creamed by motivation’ into the SE programme, which can be explained by the importance the SLO places: on maintaining inter-organisational relationships with employers, on job coaches’ performance goals and the need to uphold an organisational structure in the SLO that seemingly works efficient to shift caseloads of young unemployed into work. Hence, creaming is not specific to outsourcing but can also occur when insourcing employer engagement services into a public SLO. Although relational work directed at both employers and young clients is seen as the benefit of a combined workplace-oriented approach, it appears a rather flimsy foundation for successful ALMPs unless supported by more structural demand-side measures.

The article analyses opinions on deservingness expressed by social media users in debates about social welfare granted to refugees and families with dependent children in Poland. The article’s focus is on the content of deservingness criteria. This term describes the variety of factual and specific expectations applied to beneficiaries within each of the deservingness criteria. Qualitative content analysis of Facebook comments led to the finding that when users evaluate beneficiaries’ deservingness, they take into account their control over their own neediness, attitude, reciprocity in relation to the general population, identity and the level of need. However, within each of these deservingness criteria there is a plenitude of diverse, specific, often contradictory concepts of what exactly the sign of (un)deservingness is. The study shows that in the case of refugees, a group deemed less deserving, those content categories are more demanding and exclusive. In particular, the content of the need category proved broad and biased toward favouring a generally ‘more deserving’ group. The understanding of families’ need was often based on collective relative deprivation and the assumption that those who are needy have been neglected in previous social welfare programs, whereas refugees’ ‘real need’ was often a logically empty category.

Over the past decade there have been repeated calls for the greater taxation of wealth. These calls have had little impact on policy. There has been a global trend to reduce or abolish taxes on wealth. The contrast suggests that it may be better now to explore how taxes on wealth may be made a reality rather than designing new tax proposals. What are the barriers to tax wealth? This paper addresses this by conducting a case study of a high profile plan for introducing a one-off wealth tax in the UK. It identifies a tyranny of the status quo, framing and the policy process as key barriers to tax reform. It uses thematic analysis to study how the plans for a one-off wealth tax were discussed in the media and the UK Parliament. This paper argues that there were important shortfalls in both the way the case for a wealth tax was framed as well as the engagement with the policy process. It claims that a stronger framing would have discussed wealth inequality in greater depth and there was a need for a less equivocal case to Parliamentarians.

Family is one of the major principles of welfare state redistribution. It has, however, rarely been at the centre of welfare state research. This contribution intends to help remedy the research gap in family-related redistribution. By examining the German welfare state which is known to be both redistributive and family-oriented, we want to answer the question of how and how far the German welfare state institutionalises family as a redistributive principle. Our case-study of German welfare state regulations in terms of family is based on the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD and its Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT). We differentiate 54 family forms to adequately reflect our three theoretical assumptions, which are: (1) redistributive logics differ across family forms, and in part markedly; (2) these differences are not the result of one coherent set of regulations, but of an interplay of partially contradictory regulations; (3) family as a redistributive principle manifests itself not only in terms of additional benefits to families, but also in terms of particular obligations of families to financially support family members before they are entitled to public support. These aspects have hardly been analysed before and combining them allows a clear evaluation of family-related redistribution.

Understanding the historical policy pathways that have led to the constellation of policies that both reflect and shape the current gender order can reveal reasons for the persistence of gender inequality in paid work and unpaid family care. Bringing together existing research and policy critique with Carol Bacchi’s framework of policy as ‘gendering practices’, this paper focuses on the role of policy as a process that constructs and upholds an unequal gender order. The discussion traces how UK social policies have since the establishment of the post-war welfare state articulated and positioned gendered possibilities for combining paid work and childrearing, shaping gendered and classed work-family life courses. The analysis illustrates that British social policy has not been consistently committed to a more equal gender regime but instead maintained a heteronormative family ideal and thus, despite various policy changes, the gendering of ‘the worker’ and ‘the parent’ as conceptualised in UK policy has persisted over the last several decades.