The welfare state literature has recently identified a shift from the protection against traditional risks to social investment. In this new future-oriented and activation-based social policy, the focus is on the redistribution of opportunities instead of income. Even if vertical redistribution from the rich to poor may be only one rationale of social action, it should not be overlooked when directing social policy from insurance to investment. This article has two objectives: first, it investigates how real this shift is in macro-economic terms, and, secondly, whether the increased focus on new social risks and social investment has possibly changed welfare states’ commitment to redistribute from the rich to poor. I compare the distribution of benefits from ‘old’ spending categories (such as retirement or unemployment) with those from ‘new’ ones (such as having care responsibilities). Analysing six European countries representing different welfare state regimes, I find no evidence that new social spending would mean necessarily renouncing egalitarian ambitions. On the contrary, in all countries the distribution of new spending is more equal or pro-poor than the spending on old social risks. Different households benefit in distinct ways: the elderly benefiting the most from traditional spending (with the exception of elderly care that is categorised here as ‘new’ social spending) and families with children and single parents from new spending.

Is public support for redistribution affected by the number of people experiencing economic strain in a country? This question is investigated by comparing twenty-eight countries in the fourth round of the European Social Survey 2008–09 using two-level linear regression models. The results show that individuals reporting economic strain support redistribution more strongly than those who do not experience economic strain. Further, individuals living in countries where many other people report economic strain also support redistribution more strongly than individuals living in countries with less economic strain. The latter correlation is not explained by objective measures of the economic situation such as household income or the income dispersal of the country. The country-level effect of economic strain holds for all income levels. It is largely driven by a tendency to strongly believe in redistribution when living in countries of widespread economic strain. The results indicate that governments would receive more rather than less public support for redistributive policies during periods of economic strain.

Variable tuition fees and bursaries, funded by higher education institutions, were introduced in England to promote student choice and provider competition, while bursaries would off-set higher fees and safeguard access. Both have been central to government reforms of undergraduate student funding since 2004. This article assesses student perceptions of the impact of bursaries on their higher education decisions and choices, and considers the implications for the 2012/13 National Scholarship Programme. It concludes that most students do not think their choices are affected by bursaries, although those who are cost-conscious, expect to receive higher bursaries, especially of £1,000 or more, and attend Russell Group universities are more likely to think bursaries are influential and important. The reconfiguration of institutional aid from 2012/13 may overcome some perceived barriers to the effectiveness of financial support, but is likely to exacerbate others, and create new impediments and inequalities.

Is China a welfare state? If so, how big is it and what does it look like? Further, how does the Chinese welfare state affect income inequality? Is it progressive or regressive? Using the China Household Income Project 1988–2007 data, this article provides updated empirical evidence on the size, structure and redistributive effect of the Chinese welfare state. We find that the Chinese welfare state is highly divided along urban–rural lines: the urban social benefit system, or the urban welfare state, stands among the more comprehensive and generous ones, similar to those in the western industrialised countries, while the rural system is minimal and residual, and similar to those in the least developed countries. The urban system has consistently reduced income inequality and has remained progressive over time. The rural system has had little impact on reducing income inequality and has been largely regressive. Social benefit for migrants has seen significant increases between 2002 and 2007 and has played an increasingly larger redistributive role. These results and recent policy changes suggest that the Chinese welfare state is likely to become more integrated, generous and progressive in the future.

This article charts the rise of one of the UK's most high profile forms of food banks: the Trussell Trust Foodbank franchise. Employing empirical data it seeks to embed the phenomenon of the growth of Foodbanks within a social policy research context. In the first instance, the role of recent and on-going shifts in the social policy context are examined, notably the importance of welfare diversification under previous Labour governments (1997–2010) and the current public spending cuts, welfare restructuring and Big Society rhetoric of the Conservative−Liberal Democrat Coalition government. The paper goes on to explore the nature of Foodbanks as emergency initiatives, providing relief and alleviation for the ‘symptoms’ of food insecurity and poverty. Data are presented which demonstrate some of the ways in which the Foodbank model and those who run the projects navigate the tension between addressing symptoms rather than ‘root causes’ of poverty and food insecurity. In the face of the simultaneous growth in emergency food initiatives and significant upheavals in social policy and welfare provision, the article culminates with an argument for social policy research and practice to harness and prioritise the human rights-based approach to food experiences.

The principle of personalisation is widespread across the UK's public sector, but precisely what this means is unclear. A number of theoretical typologies have been proposed but there has been little empirical study of how personalisation is translated into practice on the frontline. We address this gap through analysis of a unique dataset: over 200 audio and video recordings of work-focused interviews in Jobcentre Plus offices. Through detailed analysis of these recordings, we show that personalisation reflects two key dimensions: the substantive (what advisers do) and the procedural (how they do it). We illustrate these dimensions, showing how each represents a continuum, and propose a typology of personalisation in practice, reflecting how the dimensions interact. We conclude with some thoughts on the relevance of our findings for advisory practice in the future under the Coalition government's new Work Programme.

The idea that the happiness and wellbeing of individuals should shape government policy has been around since the enlightenment; today such thinking has growing practical policy relevance as governments around the world survey their populations in an effort to design social policies that promote wellbeing. In this article, we consider the social determinants of subjective wellbeing in the UK and draw lessons for social policy. Survey data are taken from the ‘Measuring National Wellbeing Programme’ launched by the UK's Office for National Statistics in 2010. For the empirical strategy, we develop bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models, as well as testing for interaction effects in the data. The findings show that wellbeing is not evenly distributed within the UK. Socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, employment, household composition and tenure all matter, as does health status. Influencing population wellbeing is inherently complex, though, that said, there is a clear need to place greater emphasis on the social, given the direction of current policy.

Defining asset poverty as insufficiency of assets to satisfy household basic needs for a limited period of time, the study examines asset-poverty rates in urban China using the 2002 survey data from the Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP). We find that asset-poverty rates in urban China are lower than those of developed countries, in part due to Chinese households’ strong commitment to precautionary savings and the low poverty standards. However, the liquid asset-poverty rate is five times that of the income-poverty rate in urban China. Notably, the asset-poverty-gap ratio shows that most households in asset poverty have zero liquid assets or negative net worth. Asset building could be an integral part of the anti-poverty agenda to protect the poor from economic hardship and provide them with opportunities for economic growth.

The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies is still relatively underexplored. This article examines the role of resentment in the construction of a particular form of ‘anti-welfare populism’ advanced by the Coalition Government in the UK after 2010. We argue that UK political parties have appropriated the discourse of fairness to promote fundamentally divisive policies which have been popular with large sections of the electorate including, paradoxically, many poorer voters. In focus group research in white working class communities in the UK undertaken just before the 2010 General Election, resentments related to perceived unfairness and loss emerged as very strong themes among our respondents. We examine such resentments in terms of an underlying ‘structure of feeling’ which fuels the reactionary populism seen in ‘anti-welfare’ discourses. These promote increasingly conditional and punitive forms of welfare in countries experiencing austerity, such as the UK, creating rivalries rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’ and drawing attention away from greater inequalities.

Intergroup conflict, whether manifest as the absence of community cohesion or as the presence of antisocial behaviour, is an issue of international concern. In the UK, confronting the reality or perceived threat of intergroup conflict is a core feature of community cohesion and antisocial behaviour policies. To varying degrees, the frameworks underpinning these policies see the absence or breakdown of community relations as a cause of social disharmony. A key challenge for policy is therefore improvement of the quality of community relations. In this paper, we consider how government has approached this challenge. We filter our analysis through the lens of civility, which proposes that the peaceful coexistence of diverse social groups rests on the existence and maintenance of intergroup empathy and mutual respect. This proposal is supported by international research evidence on the outcomes of meaningful interactions, where these are predicated on equal group status, leading to changes in group and intergroup perceptions and behaviours (the contact hypothesis). We consider the extent to which community cohesion and anti-social behaviour policies in the UK demonstrate a coherent conception of the problem of community relations, the quality of community relations to which these policies aspire and whether the strategies deployed to address community relations seek to support civility through meaningful interaction. We find that the policy debates start from different presumptions concerning the roots of social disharmony, and this is reflected in the nature of the interventions which the community cohesion and antisocial behaviour policy frameworks support. In particular, we find that the social interaction promoted through policies in the UK is not necessarily aimed at achieving social harmony through meaningful interaction based on recognition of equal group status. We also show that these policies are based on little in the way of evidence and prior knowledge.

Meetings between advisers and claimants are central to many welfare-to-work programmes. These ‘street-level’ exchanges between clients and staff are critical to the implementation of policy. When talking to welfare claimants, it becomes clear that contact with welfare bureaucrats is constitutive of their experience of policy and it is not until parent and adviser meet and negotiate that the policy is truly enacted. The policy comes into being through an exchange between advisers and parents, who interact, albeit unequally, to shape the proceedings. This paper examines the experience of parents claiming income support who faced compulsory employment measures. Drawing on research with claimants of teenage children, I examine the adviser meeting as an interpellative interaction. The state addresses mothers as workers and welfare claimants in an interpellation which is mediated by the adviser in dialogue with the mother. This analysis demonstrates how the notion of interpellation can inform research on street-level interactions.

Policies that reduce applications for disability insurance by improving employment prospects of people at risk of applying could be an effective way to control the costs of such programmes. Yet little is known about whether potential applicants would respond to such policies. This paper uses administrative records merged with the Survey of Income and Programme Participation to document employment transitions preceding applications for Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) in the US. Most future applicants report a health shock shortly before they stop working, but they typically remain out of work for some months before they apply for DI. Classifying episodes of non-employment by beginning events reveals that spell length, job search, Unemployment Insurance participation and DI application processing time differ notably by reason of job loss. These findings suggest that applicants generally do not apply immediately after job loss and that those not directly affected by an illness or injury tend to consider other options before applying for benefits. Social policies aimed at increasing re-employment opportunities for such individuals could therefore be effective in reducing application rates.

Apart from health care and education, it could be argued that working-age households with above-average income in the UK have never relied as much on the welfare state as their counterparts in many other European countries. How then do better-earning households expect to cope financially with the risk of unemployment, and to what extent do they plan ahead for a possible loss of earnings? Based on sixty-one interviews with couples, the article discusses various sources of income protection that these households envisage drawing upon in the event of unemployment. State benefits figure only marginally, private insurances to a limited extent and savings slightly more. However, there is little evidence of strategic planning. By contrast, many perceive their current job and personal employability as providing some security and regard the prospect of occupational redundancy pay as a major source of income protection. This finding contrasts sharply with a paucity of systematic information about the actual scope, quality and development of employer-based income security.

The Work Programme's use of severe social security benefit sanctions reflects British coalition ministers’ belief that many people on out-of-work benefits do not want a job. While a substantial empirical literature has repeatedly demonstrated that in fact unemployed benefit claimants possess the same work values as the employed and that the vast majority want paid work, it has ignored some conservative authors’ pleas to consider the views and experiences of people who work with the unemployed. Forty employees of agencies contracted to help unemployed people into employment were interviewed in summer 2011. Respondents had spent an estimated combined total of 147,000 hours in the presence of people who have claimed Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) for over six months. Most said that between a quarter and half of their present clients did not want employment. This finding does not contradict existing research, given that most JSA claimants re-enter employment within six months. However, all forty agreed that many others remained unemployed because they were choosy in the jobs they were willing to undertake, and, most strikingly, respondents overwhelmingly endorsed the view that a ‘dependency culture’ exists in households and neighbourhoods that have experienced joblessness for several generations.

Much research focusing on the welfare state is based on the assumption that welfare regimes are homogenous entities. This idea is supported by studies analysing cash benefits. In the area of welfare services, however, local governments in most countries have some autonomy regarding policy formation as well as the design and implementation of policies. In practice, substantial local differences exist with regard to the provision of welfare services, which in turn challenge our conception of nation-wide homogenous welfare state regimes. This paper examines the factors causing marked differences in local government spending in the provision of care for older people in Denmark. The conclusion is that the wealth of the municipality, local demographics and privatisation can explain about 48 per cent of the differences in local government spending. Political factors such as the ‘colour’ of local government have no explanatory power, while a high percentage of women in municipal councils appears to have a slightly negative effect on spending.

The paper explores the evolution of rehabilitative, rights and economic discourses, and their effect on the development of juvenile justice policies in Israel during the last two decades. Israel has adopted the main features of a neo-liberal regime and severe cuts were made to major social welfare programmes, including those dealing with juvenile offenders. However, the neo-liberal ideas of individualisation and responsibilisation did not penetrate the area of juvenile delinquency. A renewed welfarist discourse in Israel was created instead. This strongly relied on traditional beliefs in rehabilitation and treatment based on a child-centred culture, incorporating concepts of rights and embedded in practical economic considerations.

The proliferation of agency employment in Pakistan is a serious social problem and a public policy concern because of the potentially negative implications for agency workers’ basic statutory rights. Agency workers are normally given a vastly different, often negligible, package of benefits compared to their permanent counterparts and are generally excluded from collective bargaining arrangements. Unions regard the use of agency employment as a threat to their jurisdiction and membership. This study explored the motives, nature and implications of agency employment in six case study organisations in Pakistan. A total of eighty-nine interviews, undertaken with employers’ representatives, agency and union officials and agency workers revealed sufficient evidence confirming previous anecdotal evidence that some employment agencies are not truly genuine and the set up was merely a legal fiction. Evidence suggested that agency employment often involves dubious, unfair, law-evading and at times illegal practices, such as the use of pay-rolling agencies. The pay-rolling agency system is potentially an attempt by employers to bypass statutory obligations concerning workers’ benefit entitlements and trade union rights by paying workers through an agency to illustrate the indirectness of employment. It thus appeared from the evidence that the use of temporary agency workers is, in many instances, a labour relations strategy rather than a matter of workforce flexibility, and challenges the widely held belief that temporary work has only been a natural and inevitable response to changes in the economy.

There is a long tradition in the assessment of UK social policy of examining benefit entitlement and access, yet little attention has been paid towards benefits associated with bereavement and, in particular, what happens for those people who cannot afford a funeral and require state assistance. This is despite the fact that every year approximately one in ten deaths in the UK results in a claim to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Funeral Payment for a contribution towards funeral costs. Beyond a paper in this journal over ten years ago, no research has been conducted into how the scheme is administered and what happens to those people who claim. Drawing on a study with both successful and unsuccessful Funeral Payment claimants, funeral directors and key stakeholders, this paper evaluates the Funeral Payment in terms of eligibility and entitlement, and timing and cost. It argues that closer attention needs to be paid to the issue of financial support for funerals to avoid the evolution of an unwieldy system at a time when the UK death rate is predicted to rise owing to the ageing of the population.

This study applies critical discourse analysis to the public discourse in Israel regarding the battle of single mothers against extensive welfare cuts. Using the protest of July 2003 as a case study, the article points to parallels between Israel's neo-liberal welfare discourse and that in the US, but also reveals a competing discourse in Israel that incorporated several basic cultural motifs: motherhood, militarism, Zionism and nationalism. While the latter discourse stresses the importance of motherhood and its contribution to society, the former presents single mothers as dependents living off the country's welfare resources. The discourse analysis shows that despite the seeming legitimacy of motherhood in Israel, especially of the Zionist mother who gives birth to soldiers, the negative imagery applied by the neo-liberal ideology to single mothers who receive allowances succeeded in eroding this legitimacy.

Andrew Dunn challenges social policy researchers to include the perspectives of other policy actors in the debate about the merits and limits of activation policies that emphasise greater conditionality for those in receipt of benefits. In his provocative article, he focuses on the views and experiences of people who work with unemployed people. His study focuses on a sample of forty employment advisers in the UK and his particular interest is in their attitudes about unemployment and the unemployed, particular their views on the ‘welfare dependency’ thesis. While his discussion of these issues is interesting and engaging, there are a number of limitations that deserve further discussion.