Increasing caregiving needs for family members has created pressure on prime-age workers. Combined with the ageing population, the demand for care related to illness and disability by relatives mean more of the workforce may have to consider caring needs (Bauer and Sousa-Poza, 2015). ‘Informal caregivers’ provide care generally without payment (Yoo et al., 2004). In contrast to formal care, informal caregivers usually have a close relationship with the recipient: for example, siblings and adult children. Informal caregiving is considered a desirable option to meet support needs from several perspectives; these caregivers may be preferred by recipients relative to formal arrangements especially during severe acute illnesses. Caregivers may also feel a personal sense of responsibility to look after loved ones rather than defer to strangers (Fine, 2012) though this may depend on the individual’s needs and the available alternatives. Although men are starting to play an important role due to shifting social gender roles, the vast majority of informal caregivers are women who increasingly attempt to juggle caring with labour force participation (Carmichael et al., 2008).

At the nexus of the social and penal policy fields, problem-solving justice promises to punish offenders while working to address the complex issues that drive their law-breaking behaviour. Appealing to the left and right due to its dual focus on pragmatism and welfarism, the concept has floated in and out of political fashion for the past two decades. Recent years have heralded a renewed political interest in the approach, closely aligned to the Conservative government’s commitment to ‘transforming justice’. With a focus on empowerment and collaboration, the problem-solving model has much to offer women offenders in particular. Drawing on data from a large-scale study into the sentencing and punishment of women under the new probation arrangements, this article reveals a divergence of views on gender-specific courts among sentencers, probation officers and third sector workers. Moral concerns about up-tariffing sit alongside the practical barriers of government bureaucracy and hindering legislation. With data pertaining to effectiveness (rather than potential) still required, this article argues that specialist problem-solving courts for women present a risky strategy, however seductive their promise.

In this paper we explore whether the recent rise in food bank usage in the UK has been induced by the roll-out of Universal Credit. We bring together official statistics on the introduction of Universal Credit with data on food bank usage from the UK’s largest food bank network. We test the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution using a range of causal identification strategies (such as fixed-effects model, Granger causality tests, and matching designs) and consistently find that an increase in the prevalence of Universal Credit is associated with more food parcel distribution. We also find that the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution is stronger in areas where food banks are active, suggesting food insecurity arising from Universal Credit may be hidden in places where food banks are largely unavailable. Though it is challenging to implement any large-scale change to social security, our analysis suggests systemic and persistent problems with this new system. Whilst the logic of Universal Credit is intuitively appealing, it has also proven to be unforgiving, leaving many struggling to make ends meet.

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has been attracting increasing attention globally over recent years. However, research on the individual and institutional determinants of UBI support is scarce. The present study attempts to fills this gap by analysing workers’ attitudes towards UBI schemes in 21 European welfare states and focusing on the roles of precarious work (i.e. part-time work, temporary employment, low-skilled service employment, and solo self-employment) and unemployment benefit generosity (i.e. net replacement rate, payment duration, and qualifying period). We estimate fixed and random effects logistic models by merging country-level institutional data with the European Social Survey Round 8 data collected in 2016. The findings show that temporary employment is associated with positive attitudes towards UBI schemes, whereas other types of precarious work do not have significant influences. In addition, the results reveal that the more generous a country’s unemployment benefits, the less likely are workers in that country to support UBI schemes.

Equal access to childcare services is a key concern of childcare policy. This article analyses social inequalities in the availability of such services. We explore how observed disparities are related to the socio-economic status of neighbourhoods and investigate how different provider types contribute to such differences. To do so, we use data on all childcare centres in the city of Vienna, Austria, on the spatial distribution of children aged under six and on three measures of neighbourhood status, over a period of eight years. We find that spatial accessibility is highest in neighbourhoods with the highest socio-economic status, that such inequality has increased over time and that both effects can be attributed to the role of non-profits. The results indicate that the policy change undertaken in Vienna towards increased communitarisation – that is, a shift towards non-profit provision – has undermined the universal character of the city’s childcare system.

Service integration is a global trend aiming to create partnerships, cost-effectiveness and joined-up working across public and third sector services to support an ageing population. However, social policy research suggests that the policy making process behind integration and implementation is complex, contradictory and full of tension. This paper explores social policy integration at the ground-level of services in the health and housing sector within a new integrated model for housing for older people. The paper applies a critical Lipskian approach to show that housing can promote integration for both users and wider stakeholders. Front-line workers were central to service integration, often working to integration principles despite policy changes and uncertainty. Challenges of social policy integration include the gaps between policy and practice and the developing nature of interaction at the ground-level – most notably, the role of technology. Technology and digital health platforms could enhance service user and practitioner interactions at the ground-level. The paper calls for renewed focus on policy processes in relation to service integration and consideration of new forms of service user, practitioner and policy maker interaction.

Decades of commitment to the basic principles of the Danish welfare state have been discarded with a new social policy reducing the benefits for people already at the bottom of the income ladder. The political intention is to increase job search via economic incentives that increase the gap between benefit income and market income. Using a panel dataset with benefit recipients, we show that the intended job search effect did not materialise to any significant extent; rather, the affected people became poorer because the vast majority of individuals could not respond to the economic incentives in the intended manner. Joblessness was not due to lack of incentives. This study confirms the importance of employability and self-efficacy, but it shows that health is an underlying variable that explains both of these factors and the recipients’ difficulties in getting a job. The results have two major social policy implications. Access to early retirement schemes should be easier for recipients who have serious health problems and therefore cannot respond to economic incentives, and there should be an increased focus on how to help the recipients without major health problems to develop self-efficacy.

Following the shift towards an activating role of the European welfare states, there is increasing scholarly interest in public support for demanding activation policies that impose obligations on welfare recipients. Borrowing the classical theoretical frameworks used in welfare attitudes research, we aim to disentangle the effect of self-interest and ideological beliefs on support for demanding activation. Using data from the Belgian National Election Study (2014), we find that support for demanding activation is strongly related to authoritarian dispositions, work ethic and rejection of egalitarianism. For the social-structural variables, we find direct as well as indirect (that is, mediated by the ideological dimensions) effects. Controlling for ideology, social categories that are potentially most affected by welfare obligations – i.e. those currently unemployed, with a previous experience of unemployment and low-income individuals – are more likely to oppose demanding policies, which can be interpreted as a self-interest effect. The effects of educational level, conversely, are primarily mediated and should be understood in terms of ideological preferences rather than self-interest. Our results indicate that, when analysing support for specific welfare policies, attention needs to be paid to the interplay between self-interest and ideological preferences.

Equivalence scales, used to compare incomes across household types, strongly influence which households have low reported income, affecting public policy priorities. Yet they draw on abstract, often dated evidence and arbitrary judgements, and on comparisons across the income distribution rather than focusing on minimum requirements. Budget standards provide more tangible comparisons of the minimum required by different household types. The Minimum Income Standard (MIS) method, now established in several countries, applies a common methodological framework for compiling budgets, based on public deliberations. This article draws for the first time on results across countries. In all of the four countries examined, it identifies an under-estimation by the OECD scale of the relative cost of children compared to adults, and, in three of the four, an under-estimation of the cost of singles compared to couples. This more systematically corroborates previous, dispersed evidence, and helps explain which specific expenditure categories influence these results. These results have high policy relevance, showing greater proportions of low income households to contain children than standard income distribution data. While no single equivalence scale can be universally accurate, making use of evidence based directly on benchmarks such as MIS can help inform public priorities in tackling low income.

Public support for the welfare state – and the policies constituting it – has long been a topic of research. Previous research on support for redistribution has tended to focus on how either country-level characteristics (particularly those relating to the macro-economy such as levels of economic development or income inequality) or individual-level political factors (such as left-right political orientation and sociodemographic factors) shape support for redistribution. To date, empirical research has insufficiently tested how macroeconomic context and individual political orientations interact. Research has also obscured whether the effects of macroeconomic context hold cross-sectionally (across country contexts) or longitudinally (within countries over time). Drawing on data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this article examines the cross-sectional (between-country) and longitudinal (within-country) interactive relationships involving economic development and income inequality (on one hand) and left–right political orientations (on the other) in shaping preferences for redistribution. Results indicate that there are larger left–right cleavages in attitudes in wealthier countries, more unequal countries, and countries where inequality is increasing. These findings challenge the dominant practice of focusing exclusively on additive effects of individual-level or country-level factors by showing the importance of paying attention to cross-level interactions.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly popular in the public sector to improve the cost-efficiency of service delivery. One example is AI-based profiling models in public employment services (PES), which predict a jobseeker’s probability of finding work and are used to segment jobseekers in groups. Profiling models hold the potential to improve identification of jobseekers at-risk of becoming long-term unemployed, but also induce discrimination. Using a recently developed AI-based profiling model of the Flemish PES, we assess to what extent AI-based profiling ‘discriminates’ against jobseekers of foreign origin compared to traditional rule-based profiling approaches. At a maximum level of accuracy, jobseekers of foreign origin who ultimately find a job are 2.6 times more likely to be misclassified as ‘high-risk’ jobseekers. We argue that it is critical that policymakers and caseworkers understand the inherent trade-offs of profiling models, and consider the limitations when integrating these models in daily operations. We develop a graphical tool to visualize the accuracy-equity trade-off in order to facilitate policy discussions.

The establishment of internal markets for healthcare provision in publicly-funded healthcare systems brings forth a number of new regulatory challenges. During the 2003 healthcare reform in Turkey, universal health coverage (UHC) was implemented concurrently with the establishment of an internal market for service provision, resulting in an increase in private sector activity. In this context, this paper explores how, in the Turkish case, the macro-level adoption of an internal market model for healthcare provision has shaped patient experiences at the micro-level in their ability to receive treatment in private hospitals offering publicly-funded services (PHOPS). It also examines the influence of the internal market on the realised publicness of healthcare services in Turkey. Data for the study were obtained from patient complaints that appeared on a private online platform and 20 patient interviews. These showed that patients sometimes face significant challenges, including pressure to make informal payments, when accessing their entitlements, which is evidence of the erosion of publicness in a hybrid healthcare system. These challenges emerge from information asymmetry between patients and providers; a large space for PHOPS to manoeuvre when deciding to register patients as insurance holders or private patients; and the ineffective public regulation of the internal market.

This study evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of defamilization as a concept for analysing state-market-family relationships in comparative perspective. A paradox has emerged around defamilization in the last decade; its use in empirical large-N research has grown markedly despite mounting criticism in theoretical discussions. Applying criteria of conceptual goodness, we find that the popularity of the concept is based on its high degree of parsimony, theoretical utility and field utility, but that there are problems with the resonance, coherence and differentiation of the concept. We argue that defamilization is most coherent and has greatest utility if the concept’s roots in welfare state theory are fully acknowledged. In our view, this means that defamilization is best understood a) alongside the separate concept of familization, b) as a multidimensional concept in terms of economic and social dependencies in family relationships, and c) as a means of addressing both gender and intergenerational dependencies. Although suitable for operationalization in empirical research, the concept hence imposes high demands regarding the required data and possible analyses.

Austerity is frequently associated with crisis-enabled spending cuts. What happens when the crisis is over? This article’s original contribution lies in its in-depth exploration of one mechanism that help explain austerity’s endurance post-crisis, when state elites face increased popular resistance and pressure to reinstate social spending. This mechanism calls attention to the role of economists in Central Budgeting Offices as agents of technocratization and de-politicization within social policy domains. These economists may institute an austere spending mode by changing social spending’s norms and instruments. To demonstrate economists’ role in mediating macroeconomic fiscal goals and social policy design over time, the article examines the development of child welfare policy in Israel before, during and in the aftermath of economic crisis. In this case, austerity attained hegemony when economists were able to delegitimize and shelve an ‘irresponsible’ social spending proposal – and in response to post-crisis demands for compensation – introduce an austere policy instrument to cap social spending during a period of social policy expansion. This analysis suggests that scholars regard relations between austerity and social spending as dialectical.

In the context of a mixed economy of welfare, public policy in the UK and elsewhere has long promoted third sector involvement in delivering public services. A growing research literature consistently highlights the challenges third sector organisations face engaging with a demanding public services commissioning environment, but it tends to lack a theoretical basis and can offer misleading accounts of third sector organisations as relatively passive and powerless in the face of wider forces. This article argues that third sector organisations actively operate within and seek to shape a commissioning context which advantages some strategies and some types of organisation over others. To provide stronger theoretical foundations for understanding public services commissioning and the third sector, the concept of ‘strategic selectivity’ (Hay, 2002) is applied to in-depth qualitative longitudinal data from third sector organisations delivering a range of public services. The article contributes new theoretical insights into the dynamic ways in which social policies and public services are organised. The analysis highlights how differently positioned organisations seek to read, navigate pathways through, and transform an uneven public services commissioning landscape.

The article investigates the causes and consequences of the increased engagement of British universities with employability and skills initiatives. By employing case studies of six universities based in England, it asks whether the increased engagement between higher education and the labour market is driven by universities or business and whether such engagement has increased the diversity of the higher education sector. Findings suggest that the alignment between labour market needs and educational provision in universities is strongly mediated by the competitive environment within which higher education institutions have been operating since the late 1990s: the higher education market – not the labour market – is the key driver for universities to engage in employability and skills initiatives. The article also questions the assumption that ‘competition’ leads to ‘differentiation’ in higher education. Rather, isomorphic tendencies seem to prevail over differentiation in the context of a highly competitive higher education market.

This study assesses the impact of South Carolina’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, Family Independence (FI), on the longitudinal earnings of three cohorts of new entrants who entered the study before, at the beginning of, and at the height of the 2007-2009 recession. Applicants who began the application process but did not enroll in TANF were propensity-score matched to entrants by background characteristics including pre-intervention earnings history, and served as the comparison group. We constructed a latent growth curve model to test whether earnings histories were similar for the program and comparison groups up until FI intake, to estimate program impact by comparing post-intake earnings of program participants to those of the comparison group, and to determine the statistical significance of cohort differences in program impact. The findings showed FI had a positive impact on the earnings of participants before the recession. The effect became weaker during the state’s period of rising unemployment, and disappeared during the worst economic recession in decades. This study demonstrates the usefulness of longitudinal administrative data, propensity score matching, and latent growth modeling techniques for evaluating the impact of program interventions.

In this article, we examine how labour market policy interventions, notably short-time work (STW), affect voting behaviour in times of electoral downturn. We use the 2009 German general elections as an example. This is a particularly interesting case because the grand coalition of Christian democrats (CDU/CSU) and social democrats (SPD) was up for re-election against the backdrop of a major recession following the 2007/08 financial crisis and extensively used STW policies to counteract rising unemployment. Interestingly, STW policy and unemployment vary considerably between regions. We exploit this variance to create a unique dataset that combines regional information on STW policy and unemployment in 299 German electoral constituencies with individual data from the post-election survey. Our results show that especially the SPD profited from high STW rates at constituency level on election day, but this policy was insufficient to preclude the major losses social democrats suffered during the election. More generally, our results indicate that classic labour market policy can generate electoral support for social democratic parties, even as a “junior partner” in a grand coalition. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether such support is sufficient for electoral victories.

Drawing on a 2010 analysis of the reform and costs of adult social care commissioned by Downing Street and the UK Department of Health, this paper sets out projected future costs under different reform scenarios, reviews what happened in practice from 2010-19, explores the impact of the growing gap between need and funding, and explores the relationship between future spending and economic growth. In the process, it identifies a ‘lost decade’ in which policy makers failed to act on the warnings which they received in 2010, draws attention to the disproportionate impact of cuts on older people (compared to services for people of working age) and calls for urgent action before the current system becomes unsustainable.

This paper explores the relationship between social capital and a community initiative known as timebanking. Its purpose is to offer a more critical account of the literature to date, which suggests timebanking generates improved health outcomes because it facilitates bridging social capital. Drawing on Cattell’s (2011) analysis of social networks the paper offers an alternative account. It suggests a more nuanced view of social networks shows the development of different networks by members, resulting from gendered forms of participation. The consequences of this is that whilst different network forms provide sources of pride and coping mechanisms for members, for women they inhabit more diverse networks which offer greater benefits whilst men may still experience some forms of exclusion and isolation through their participation.