Debates about the meaning of citizenship have grown since the election of the first New Labour government. These debates have tended to focus on the government's assertion of the central role of work in defining the status of citizen, a stance which has increasingly been criticised for devaluing unpaid work such as caring or volunteering. However, the position of those beyond labour market age – older people – has rarely been examined in relation to how citizenship might be defined. At the same time, the concept of social exclusion, heavily utilised by New Labour to characterise those at the margins of society, has at best an ambiguous relevance to older people. This article, based on an exploration of the social, financial and other impacts of additional benefit income for older people, examines how these two concepts might be understood in relation to the position of older people and sketches out what some of the defining characteristics of citizenship might be for them.

Previous research has suggested that hidden income arising from home ownership has important consequences for poverty measurement as it tends to favour certain low income groups, especially the elderly, and to have a moderating effect on poverty rates in countries with high levels of home ownership. This article explores both methodological and substantive aspects of this issue using data for 14 EU countries drawn from the European Community Household Panel Survey 1996. Methodologically, in the absence of data needed to estimate hidden income from housing directly, it explores the validity of using a housing expenditures approach to take account of the income effects of housing in a poverty measurement context. Substantively, it examines whether poverty measured in this way in the 14 countries in the data set differs in expected directions from poverty as conventionally measured. The substantive effects are found to be modest overall and to conform only partially to expectations. Certain methodological problems raise a question mark over these findings, such as variation across countries in the degree to which mortgage payments capture the cost of house purchase for home owners. The article concludes that the distributive effects of housing are important for poverty measurement but need to be better understood within each country before attempting cross-country analysis.

This article explores the interplay between state formation and voluntary action in order to describe and understand the changing scope and type of voluntary activities and the varying role of the voluntary sector. It does so by following voluntary human service organisations within the sector of social welfare in Denmark over a period of 150 years. Four different phases of voluntary-state relationships are identified. The first phase of liberal social policy supported a dual model with a strong call for self-help and philanthropic initiatives. The next phase, in which social rights and public responsibility gradually were introduced and expanded, supported a collaborative model with a strong public–private partnership. The third phase, in which the idea of a universalistic welfare state dominated, tended to marginalise voluntary service production but strengthen interest representation. Finally, the fourth phase, in which heavy critique was thrust upon the welfare state, opened up new spaces for voluntary organisations to assume civil obligations.

In the context of rapid economic and demographic change, the People's Republic of China has attempted to reshape its public pension system. Although China's current pension system has drawn the attention of many policy analysts, no theoretically informed account on the politics of Chinese pension reform has yet been published. Grounded in a broad institutionalist perspective, this contribution analyses contemporary pension politics in China through the interplay of four main factors: (1) decentralisation and limited administrative capacity, which make it difficult to rationalise and transform the existing pension system; (2) feedback effects from previously enacted pension schemes that further complicate policy change; (3) liberalisation and economic reforms, which have created ‘vested interests’ in the newly established private sector, but which have lacked the strength to generate a mature financial system; (4) finally, the apparent dominance of the neo-liberal financial paradigm commonly associated with the World Bank. While this financial paradigm favours the adoption of new reform proposals, the economic and institutional factors mentioned above complicate their implementation.

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have moved up the policy agenda of older industrial societies. The paper turns the spotlight on this development by exploring how the goal has been represented in England's national policy documents. Rather than one approach, there appears to be a range of understandings of what it means to tackle health inequalities. These understandings can be placed on a continuum, which runs from improving the health of poor groups, through closing the health gaps between those in the poorest circumstances and better-off groups, to addressing the association between socioeconomic position and health across the population. The paper points to common ground between the three approaches to tackling health inequalities, but also to important differences in the moral arguments and causal models on which they rest, and therefore in their policy goals and anticipated policy impacts.

This paper considers how varying discourses of social exclusion have informed policies regarding young people's participation in education, training and employment. Drawing on a cohort study of over 800 16–18 olds, the research suggests that the binary categories of exclusion/inclusion, and marginalisation/participation grow less and less adequate as parameters for understanding changing patterns of post-16 participation and non-participation. It is argued that a range of statutory, structural, financial and social pressures to normalise participation produce forms of inclusion that are ephemeral and that carry very different meanings from those implied in discourses of exclusion. The paper gives a brief overview of the changing context in which participation needs to be understood, then presents evidence and analysis of young people's trajectories after 16. Some interpretations are offered of a wide range of meanings of participation, which suggest that old notions of transition to independence are unsustainable for a substantial minority of young people, and that patterns of participation are increasingly complex, have multiple significances, and carry the potential to mask inequalities and new forms of exclusion. These readings have major implications for how we conceptualise social exclusion, and for policy developments associated with it.

This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and external circumstances limited mothers' choices. However, neither external circumstances nor identities were fixed. Behaviour and identities were therefore adjusted to each other, giving rise to feedback effects at both the individual and the social level.

While the constraints of identity limit the direct effectiveness of some policies, the long-term effectiveness of others may be enhanced by positive feedback arising from attitudes changing along with behaviour. A ‘policy multiplier’ is defined as the ratio of such indirect to direct effects. This is likely to be greater for enabling policies that lift existing constraints and enable choices that were previously not available, than for coercive policies that impose new constraints on behaviour. The article examines the implications of such feedback effects for developing policy that expands the choices available to mothers in the short term, reduces the costs of motherhood, and meets the government's long-term objectives of reducing child poverty and increasing employment.

Recent years have seen an explicit focus on parenting as a designated area of policy intervention. Parents are posed as in need of education and advice from ‘experts’, under conditions of social change. This article counterposes norms concerning who parents should turn to for support that government policies aim to inculcate with those held by parents themselves, drawing on a national representative sample of parents of 8–12 year old children. It uses a ‘consensus baseline’ approach to look at parents' perceptions of social change in parenting support, and whether or not they hold norms concerning whom to turn to and for what sort of help in parenting: practical, emotional, behaviour, health and education. Our results indicate that policy-makers have more work to do if they want to achieve a cultural step-change in norms held by parents about who is best placed to help and advice them. Family, followed by friends, are (still) regarded as the people to turn to for most childrearing issues, with ‘experts’ only providing practical help and advice about long institutionalised areas of children's lives. We also show that norms about parenting support are related to parents' differential social positioning regarding gender, class and ethnicity.

Using qualitative interviews with 54 older people, this article explores the changing patterns of the ‘generational contract’ in contemporary Britain and Japan. In particular, this article presents a cross-national comparison concerning the exchange of housing assets and long-term care between older parents and their adult children in the context of different laws, cultures, social policy and housing markets. The concepts of intergenerational solidarity, reciprocity and ambivalence were used to aid the analysis of the household data. The research found there were significant cross-national differences in areas such as autonomy and decision-making process regarding bequests, and choice of beneficiaries. In both societies, however, no strong link was found between bequest motives and family support for long-term care. The model of intergenerational solidarity (willingness to help children) thus appeared to override the reciprocal dimension of the ‘generational contract’.

For more than 50 years the United States and Canada maintained illegal-drug policies that followed the same course: a long period of punitive prohibition followed by moderation and an emphasis on drug abuse as a public health problem. Then in the 1980s, the USA reverted to a punitive model while Canada increased its commitment to a health-based approach. Why this divergence after following the same path for so long? In this paper I argue that one factor was Canada's adoption of national health insurance, which guaranteed universal access to health care, including addiction treatment. As the country's most popular policy it was protected against budget cuts during a period of welfare-state retrenchment in the 1980s. In the USA, on the other hand, public health insurance was limited to the elderly and the poor, and addiction treatment services were isolated and stigmatized. Thus the public health side of drug policy was poorly positioned to resist welfare cutbacks and ascendant criminal-justice interests. The experiences of the USA and Canada have implications for policy reformers and for the study of how institutional interests cross policy domains.

This article analyses the economic disadvantage experienced by disabled persons of working age using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We argue that there are three sources of disadvantage among disabled persons: pre-existing disadvantage among those who become disabled (a ‘selection’ effect), the effect of disability onset itself, and the effects associated with remaining disabled post-onset. We show that employment rates fall with disability onset, and continue to fall the longer a disability spell lasts, whereas average income falls sharply with onset but then recovers subsequently (though not to pre-onset levels).