Food insecurity in Europe has recently received increasing research and political attention. Yet, considerable gaps remain in our understanding: the demographic groups most at risk, the role of social benefit receipt, and whether higher-value social benefits protect against food insecurity among recipients all remain unknown. Multilevel models were used to examine food insecurity in 63,168 adults from 27 countries included in the European Quality of Life Survey in 2007 and 2011. Food insecurity was more prevalent among people with lower incomes, women, older people, renters, one-person and lone-parent households, those with lower education, people with disabilities, and those outside the labour market. Although food insecurity was concentrated at low incomes, income and food insecurity were imperfectly associated. The role of social benefit receipt was equivocal: food insecurity was not associated with pension or child benefit receipt, but was significantly more prevalent among out-of-work and all social benefit recipients, which may reflect eligibility rules and benefit conditionality. Furthermore, higher-value social benefits were not associated with lower risks of food insecurity across the different recipient groups, either because their value is insufficient, or because social benefits are unable to fully mitigate the individual and structural risk factors for food insecurity in Europe.

In light of social policy’s growing focus on children and a changing family policy portfolio, we need better classifications and a more nuanced understanding of policy approaches to children. The aim here is to contribute to further thinking and analysis by reviewing some of the existing conceptualisations and the latest relevant policy developments on the one hand and developing an analytic framework for further research on the other. The article takes an EU-wide approach and empirically examines developments in income support policy, parenting-related leaves, early childhood education and care and children’s right to participation to see what they reveal about prevailing approaches to children. The paper identifies some strong moves towards a greater focus on children in social policy but suggests differentiating between three different approaches: family-oriented, childhood-oriented and child-oriented. These approaches differ in terms of whether their primary focus is on children or adults, whether they engage with children directly or indirectly, the set of entitlements involved and the desired outcome.

Taking China as a critical case, this article questions recent literature that asserts that shame attached to poverty is both ubiquitous and always problematic. In China, the concepts of shame, loss of face, lian (integrity) and mian (reputation) once provided an ethical framework under which the existence of poverty both indicated ineffective governance and provided individuals in poverty with opportunities to demonstrate virtuous behaviour in coping with life’s hardships. Maoist rhetoric went further presenting poor peasants as national heroes albeit the outcome of Maoist policies was often to hurt the most disadvantaged most. Subsequent marketisation has transformed poverty into a manifestation of personal failing with poverty-related shame having the same likely negative consequences as found elsewhere.

The article contributes to the growing body of research on the politics of basic income by analysing the framing of the idea in the context of Finland, a country with a long history of debate and one of the forerunners in experimenting with this policy. Using a comprehensive dataset of political documents covering 36 years, the study shows how contextual factors and shifts in political climate shaped the framing of the idea. It also shows that the key frames describing basic income were widely shared among the politicians and parties discussing the policy. The study enriches our understanding of the politics of basic income by adding an ideational perspective that has for long been a missing element in this field of research.

The importance of service-user participation has been growing in the care services, but what possibilities do service users have to influence these services? This article analyses how structural factors have an impact on the scope of possibilities for user influence in care services, especially with respect to how established structures and frameworks determine users’ opportunities to influence both the allocation and the provision of services. A study of five Norwegian municipalities where managers at different levels and within different areas of the services have been interviewed forms the basis of the empirical material. In the managers’ general opinion, over time there has been a stronger individual adjustment of the services and stronger user influence over both the allocation and the provision of services. However, if we look more closely at the service-delivery process, several structural factors limiting the scope of possibilities for user influence become apparent. These factors are discussed in light of different user typologies.

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.

Pension reform is one of the top public policy priorities in advanced industrialized countries due to population ageing and the significant weight of pension spending in governments’ budgets. As a result of these concerns European countries have engaged in varying degrees of pension reforms over the last three decades. The extant literature on pension reform focuses on structural, institutional and blame avoidance theories to explain how pension reform take place. Yet, how do different conditions combine to lead to significant pension reform outcomes? To answer this question we analyze a set of 48 pension reform cases in eight European countries since the late 1980s up until 2014 by using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Our main finding is that institutional, structural or blame avoidance theories cannot account by themselves for instances of significant pension reform. Rather, we find three pathways that combine structural and institutional conditions to lead to significant pension reform.

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.

The basic income (BI) scheme is a fundamental reform of the welfare state that has recently gained widespread attention. Proposals for different variants of BI schemes have emerged to account for varying political and societal goals. This study investigates what citizens think about the idea of a BI, and to what extent citizens’ perceptions depend on the exact design of such a scheme and the context in which this policy is embedded. Empirically, we rely on conjoint experiments conducted in Finland and Switzerland – the two countries in which the introduction of a BI scheme has recently been discussed most intensely. We find that the level of public support for BI is higher in Finland than it is in Switzerland. Moreover, despite the contrasting designs of the BI proposals in the two countries, both Finnish and Swiss citizens tend to favor more generous schemes restricting non-nationals’ access to the provision.

Recent European studies suggest that fathers’ leave-taking may contribute to parental relationship stability. Paternity leave-taking may signal a commitment by fathers toward a greater investment in family life, which may reduce the burden on mothers and strengthen parental relationships. This study uses longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (ECLS-B) to analyze the association between paternity leave-taking and relationship stability in the United States. Results indicate that paternity leave-taking, and taking relatively short leaves (i.e. two weeks or less) in particular, is associated with greater relationship stability. These findings increase our understanding of the potential benefits of paternity leave, and can inform policy decisions that aim to increase family stability.

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 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.

Policy makers across the political spectrum have extolled the virtues of volunteering in achieving social policy aims. Yet little is known about the role that volunteering plays in addressing one of the significant challenges of an ageing population: the provision of care and support to people with dementia. We combine organisational survey data, secondary social survey data, and in-depth interviews with people with dementia, family carers and volunteers in order to better understand the context, role and challenges in which volunteers support people with dementia. Social policies connecting volunteering and dementia care in homes and communities often remain separate and disconnected and our paper draws on the concept of policy ‘assemblages’ to suggest that dementia care is a dynamic mixture of formal and informal volunteering activities that bridge and blur traditional policy boundaries. Linking home and community environments is a key motivation, benefit and outcome for volunteers, carers and those living with dementia. The paper calls to widen the definition and investigation of volunteering in social policy to include and support informal volunteering activity.

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.

Metaphors are inescapable in human discourse. Policy researchers have suggested that the use of particular metaphors by those implementing policy changes both influences perceptions of underlying reality and determines what solutions seem possible, and that exploring ‘practice languages’ is important in understanding how policy is enacted. This paper contributes to the literature exploring the generative nature of metaphors in policy implementation, demonstrating their role in not just describing the world, but also framing it, determining what is seen/unseen, and what solutions seem possible. The metaphor ‘care pathway’ is ubiquitous and institutionalised in healthcare. We build upon existing work critiquing its use in care delivery, and explore its use in health care commissioning, using evidence from the recent reorganisation of the English NHS. We show that the pathways metaphor is ubiquitous, but not necessarily straightforward. Conceptualising health care planning as ‘designing a pathway’ may make the task more difficult, suggesting a limited range of approaches and solutions. We offer an alternative metaphor: the service map. We discuss how approaches to care design might be altered by using this different metaphor, and explore what it might offer. We argue not for a barren language devoid of metaphors, but for their more conscious use.

Migration is an important social determinant of health for immigrants in the United States. Increased attention on Latino immigrants in recent years has sparked interest in policies that affect this population. While prior research has assessed the potential health impact of specific immigration policies, there is limited understanding of how the overall sociopolitical context shapes the health of Latino immigrants. This study examines the potential mechanisms that link the sociopolitical context and health among Latino immigrants. Specifically, we explore how perceptions of the sociopolitical context are implicated in this relationship. Qualitative interviews with community gatekeepers (n=13) and Latino immigrants (n=34) in New York City revealed general perceptions about the overall sociopolitical context, which were characterized by discrimination towards immigrants, unpredictable and mercurial circumstances, and confusion and lack of information. These perceptions influenced participants’ psycho-emotional health and health-related behaviors. Findings suggest the importance of integrating immigrants’ perceptions of the sociopolitical context into health promotion efforts. Furthermore, findings demonstrate the need for paradigm shifts in developing policy-related actions to integrate immigrants’ perspectives. We propose an integrated, multi-level framework to guide future research and practice regarding social determinants of immigrant health.

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.

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.

Homeless individuals often find that welfare services are inaccessible, despite being designed to meet their needs. This frictions with access which is a fundamental principle in western welfare states. Adaptations in social policy and service delivery are therefore made to deal with the problem of inaccessibility to services and welfare rights. One such adaptation is outreach work and is often developed to engage with homeless people and link them up with available services. This raises questions on the transformative potential of outreach work to deal with those mechanisms which result in inaccessibility. We argue that in a context in which accessibility is increasingly guaranteed by rights-based frameworks, exclusion management is also increasing. This is due to hybrid developments in social policy and welfare ideology. Nonetheless, the initial transformational potential of outreach work never really vanished.