This article presents results of a Dutch randomised experiment, challenging the ‘workfare’ paradigm, which is dominant in many countries. We study whether social assistance (SA) schemes with fewer conditions and more autonomy for recipients stimulate valuable but often overlooked unpaid socio-economic activities (USEA), which are not classified as work. In the qualitative part of the mixed method study, we generated new hypotheses stating that particularly recipients who are older, higher educated, have a migration background, have relatively poor health, or have young children, will spend more time on USEA in less conditional and more autonomous regimes. The quantitative part of the study, where two experimental conditions are compared with the usual treatment of SA recipients, does not show convincing average treatment effects, but does reveal that a less conditional and more autonomy-oriented SA scheme translates into more USEA for older people, people with a migration background and people with relatively poor mental health.

Research on street-level bureaucracy has tended to focus on individual and organisational factors that influence street-level practice. To date, empirical research has insufficiently explored the contribution of wider socio-cultural factors in street-level decision making. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of social assistance in Pakistan, this article examines how cultural patronage practices of sifarish intersect with street-level social welfare operations. Results highlight the importance of sifarish in informing decision-making processes and in enabling access to social assistance. In this manner, people providing sifarish (called sifarishie) operate as informal third-party actors. The findings challenge the dominant view of street-level operation that the decision making at street level is solely guided by individual and organisational factors.

Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social assistance. The empirical challenge is that activation through the threat of benefit sanctions is not a feature that unambiguously emerges from observational data, except for when sanctions indeed take place and benefits are reduced. To overcome this barrier, we introduce a novel methodology to identify individual-level effects of activation on young welfare recipients, exploiting municipal variation in the introduction of compulsory activation. More precisely, we study whether individuals who are residents in municipalities that have introduced compulsory activation display a stronger relationship between their labor market status (activation) and their benefit size (because sanctions being in place) compared to individuals residing in municipalities where activation has not been made compulsory. Our results show that there is no different relationship between social assistance benefits and passive labor market status for individuals living in municipalities that practice activation compared with individuals residing in municipalities in which activation is not yet mandatory. In other words, there is no visible effect of sanctions for passive recipients.

We examine an early ‘red flag system’ in the Finnish social assistance system and its efficiency in reducing the length of social assistance spells. We utilise the age-threshold in the policy that requires notifying social services on beneficiaries under twenty-five years of age after four months of social assistance receipt. Using monthly administrative data covering all twenty-three to twenty-six-year-old social assistance beneficiaries in Finland in 2018-2019, we compare the social assistance receipt of those below and above the age-threshold. Our findings show that those who are ‘red flagged’ do not exit social assistance earlier than others. On the contrary, four months after the notification is sent to social services, they are more likely to still have social assistance as their primary source of income compared to the twenty-five to twenty-six-year-old individuals. Our results shed light on the little discussed question on how to combine social work with digitalised and automatised welfare.

In many Western countries local welfare agencies retain large responsibilities in the practical organisation of means-tested support. While this may lead to substantial differences in the application trajectories of prospective claimants, what has garnered little empirical research is how local agencies use their discretion to implement practices that may encourage or discourage take-up. In addition, we know little on the extent to which variation in local implementation is attributable to differences in local conditions. Focusing on Belgium as an interesting case, this article addresses this gap by mapping the variation in local implementation practices in specific aspects of social assistance that are relevant in terms of limiting non-take-up. We assess whether certain local political, socio-demographic or economic characteristics favour implementation practices, using structural equation modelling on custom-collected data on the practical organisation of social assistance application trajectories in 119 Belgian municipalities. The results show that local welfare agencies implement coherent practices regarding information provision, accessibility, trust and the locus of initiative in the claiming process. We find the political orientation of the municipality and the share of foreigners in the municipality to be related with, respectively, shifting the locus of initiative away from the welfare claimant and a focus on information provision.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant psychological consequences among the public, especially for people in the epicenter. This study examined the ‘bull's eye’ model by comparing the level of psychological distress and the effect of different stressors in Wuhan (the original epicenter) with that in the surrounding areas in Hubei Province during the pandemic. Data were obtained from a cross-national survey of 10 478 respondents between the ages of 18 and 80 years in Hubei Province during the peak of the pandemic. Results of the ordinary least squares regression models showed that Wuhan residents experienced more psychological distress than those in the surrounding areas. Social and economic problems caused by the pandemic, risk exposure, perceived discrimination, and information-seeking behaviors were positively associated with distress. Social assistance was negatively associated with distress. Findings were consistent with the bull's eye model by revealing both a higher level of psychological distress and a stronger effect of stressors among the Wuhan residents than with those in low-risk areas. Thus, policymakers and psychological workers should provide adequate psychological services in high-risk areas. Lowering risk exposure, reducing discrimination against people in the epicenter, and improving information quality are essential to alleviate their psychological distress.

In most global south countries, various informal institutions provide welfare to a large segment of the neglected, poor and vulnerable populations through informal social protection. Despite being a major source of welfare in the global south, the usefulness of informal social protection at the household level remains an under-researched area. In this exploratory study, we have determined the usefulness of informal social protection provided through religious institutions, such as madrassas and compared it with formal social protection at the household level utilising the case study of a lower-income country such as Pakistan. A mixed methodology of data collection comprising a survey and semi-structured interviews in 14 different cities of Pakistan of the poor and eligible households for receiving formal social protection was conducted for the research. The results suggest the coverage of informal social protection provided by madrassas is greater than formal social protection. The poor and vulnerable population value and considers it more useful than formal social protection. We conclude that integrating informal and formal social protection would help improve the effectiveness of social policies in developing and less developed countries.

The expansion of social pensions in Latin America was part of a larger process aimed at extending protections to informal workers and other individuals not covered by social insurance. These reforms were enacted by governments of different colours, and varied considerably with regard to the scope of the new programmes. While previous comparative studies have privileged economic factors and electoral dynamics to explain these differences, this article extends these frameworks to incorporate the interplay between contentious and institutional politics. It uses a two-step qualitative comparative analysis to investigate the long-term effect of protests on reforms extending the coverage of social pensions under different constellations of political, economic and institutional conditions in 18 Latin American countries (2000-2011). The results show that protest was present in almost all configurations of expansion, but that its effect was contingent on the ideology of governments, the levels of political competition and the strength of unions.

Churches’ positions and preferences in social policy are often described in the literature as fixed over time. The article challenges this assumption. In particular, it shows how the Italian Catholic Church (CC) changed over time its position toward social assistance and migration policies. In relation to social assistance, the CC has shifted from an antagonist approach to public intervention to the support of a universal public minimum income scheme. At a time of increasing aversion towards migrants, the Catholic Church has also become one of the few core actors in Italian society advocating explicitly for more welcoming migration policies and criticising national governments, especially the populist ones. Four factors explain these changes: the way institutions have worked in this policy field, CC material interests, how new ideas on social rights and social justice have been re-elaborated within the CC and its moral authority in politics.

A central assumption in social policy research and practice is that a strong working alliance between caseworkers and clients produces the best outcomes. There is, however, limited empirical evidence to support this assumption. This is especially the case within Active Labour Market Policies, where existing research focuses on programme effects rather than relationship effects.

In this article, we examine whether strong working alliances produce higher employment and education outcomes for disadvantaged jobseekers. The case is a Danish municipality that invested in reducing the caseloads of caseworkers working with disadvantaged social assistance recipients. The data combine survey data on social assistance recipients with outcome data from national administrative registers. Based on linear regressions, the analysis indicates that strong working alliances are positively related to subsequent employment and education outcomes. We discuss the implications, limitations and generalisability of this finding and the conditions for providing stronger working alliances in employment services.