A growing number of studies investigate the relative importance of the major deservingness criteria (control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, need) in explaining the perceived welfare deservingness of different social groups. This paper addresses the roles of those criteria in predicting the perceived deservingness of a rarely examined group, single mothers. We conducted a survey in Hungary and compare the responses to direct questions about deservingness to the results of a vignette-based survey experiment in which the deservingness criteria were translated to characteristics of hypothetical mothers. Our results show that in the absence of deservingness cues (direct questions), respondents relied on the attitude, reciprocity/control, identity (measured by traditional family values), and need criteria to the same extent. On the other hand, in the presence of specific deservingness cues (vignette experiment), people disregarded their family values and stereotypes, and the perceived need became the strongest predictor of single mothers’ deservingness. These results support the existence of the deservingness heuristic, however, compared to previous literature that emphasized the role of perceived control and reciprocity of recipients, in the case of single mothers, the deservingness heuristic seems to direct people’s attention to the perception of need.

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) have become key anti-poverty reduction strategies in Latin America. There are different types of CCTs implemented at the national and subnational level in this region. This paper analyses the design of CCT programmes directed to assist female heads of households at the state level in Mexico. To do so, the study applies an analytical framework to make a comparative study of the key features of the design, looking specifically at the way the target population is constructed as welfare recipients and citizens. The results of this qualitative study suggest that, irrespective of the purposes of these social programmes, the design reflects certain values and normative beliefs related to the notion of market citizenship, which also seem to intersect with certain ideas about motherhood and the poor in Mexico.

This article offers an ethnographically-based counterpoint to recent optimistic macro-approaches to the “migration-development nexus” that view international labour migrants as “agents of change,” depict migration as a win-win for the sending and receiving states, and associate migration with positive changes in the sending community, including the influx of monetary remittances and the entry of new ideas, such as gender equity and human rights (Faist 2008). Based on over sixteen months of ethnographic field research among Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers who became mothers in Hong Kong, I argue that it is important to consider examples of so-called ‘failed migration’ (not only migratory successes) in order to fully understand the costs of migration, including the gendered risks and gendered inequalities. Cases of migrant mothers vividly reveal how migratory ‘failures’ are often blamed on women's individual gendered moral shortcomings, but as I argue, their experiences, and those of all migrant workers, must be understood within specific contexts of precarious labour migration and Asian neoliberal policies of exception in Asia.