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This conceptual article and special issue introduction argues for the importance of studying three policy paradigms surrounding welfare policy opposition. The first is welfare populism, the opposition to welfare policies that do not benefit the 'common people'. The second is welfare chauvinism, the opposition to welfare policies for non-natives within a nation-state. The third is welfare Euroscepticism, the opposition to welfare policies at the European Union level. These paradigms have distinct causes and consequences that should be studied in more detail across different political actors. And while welfare policy opposition may not lead to a complete farewell to welfare, they have been shaping and will continue to shape welfare state recalibration. This article offers summaries of the special issue contributions with empirical snapshots of welfare policy opposition and concludes with avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research on welfare chauvinism, which involves preferences about the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants in welfare programmes, often overlooks individual preferences regarding immigration policy openness (the number of immigrants allowed into a country). This article posits that these two dimensions should be considered together. The reason is that the implications of including or excluding migrants in welfare programmes vary significantly depending on whether a country admits few or many immigrants. Utilizing data from two waves of the European Social Survey across 23 European countries, we develop a typology of individual stances that encapsulate attitudes towards both immigration policy openness and immigrant inclusion in the welfare state. Our analysis reveals that the distribution of these stances varies considerably across European nations. We further examine how the probability of endorsing one of these typologies correlates with individual socio-economic characteristics, especially education. We find that higher education levels are linked to a higher likelihood of supporting either a combination of openness and inclusion or, to a lesser extent, openness paired with welfare exclusion. Additionally, more exclusionary attitudes are observed in countries where welfare usage by migrants is higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the European Union (EU) increasingly strengthens its social integration, opposition towards this process can also be observed, here defined as 'welfare Euroscepticism'. To better understand this newly defined policy paradigm, this article aims to explain longstanding cleavages in both social policy and EU research: socioeconomic status (SES) divides. Contrary to the literature on public support for European integration, this article argues that higher SES groups are more likely to be welfare Eurosceptics than lower SES groups. This argument and its underlying explanations are examined through a multilevel approach using European Social Survey data from 18 EU member states, using the example of a potential EU-wide minimum income scheme. First, the results demonstrate that welfare Euroscepticism is indeed more prevalent among higher SES groups than lower SES groups (measured through occupation, education, income, and employment). The results indicate robust self-interest patterns among higher SES groups that do not want to carry (perceived) financial burdens of EU social policies. The opinion patterns also emphasize the multidimensionality of attitudes towards EU policies since the SES cleavages can reverse, depending on the policy in focus. Overall, the results indicate much potential to mobilize the larger proportion of the public to support EU social policies, that is, lower SES groups. However, potential conflicts may arise when the EU expands on policies that their traditional supporters – higher SES groups – are more likely to oppose. The article also shows that welfare solidarity on the individual and the country level can mitigate such conflicts. This is because higher levels of welfare generosity and lower levels of welfare chauvinism on the individual and the country level are related to smaller SES cleavages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains welfare chauvinistic policy reform, that is, targeted exclusion of non-citizens from welfare? Existing research suggest that contextual factors like far-right party success, perceived immigration pressures, party ideologies and institutions could spur such reform, but the processes behind reforms remain understudied. This article draws on public policy literature to call attention the critical role of agency and institutions in welfare chauvinist reform. It focuses on a law excluding migrant EU citizens from social assistance in Germany. Through process tracing and inductive reconstruction of the policy process, based on political documents, interviews, media reporting and descriptive statistics, we show that the policy proposal originated from German city administrations; that the city of Hamburg was key in pushing for exclusions; and that Hamburg's success in doing so crucially depended on the city's mayor. Several comparable German cities (in terms of party politics and levels of immigration) were equally concerned with 'welfare immigration' and complained about problem pressure, but only Hamburg had a committed mayor with the right political networks and institutional resources to lobby for welfare exclusions at the federal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare chauvinism and welfare populism as characteristic features of radical right parties' welfare stances have become challenges to the welfare state. However, in order to understand how these claims may indeed affect welfare politics, it is essential to study whether welfare chauvinism and welfare populism attract voters beyond the radical right, especially among the mainstream right or even parts of the left. Results based on original public opinion data in eight Western European countries show that, contrary to widespread assumptions, welfare chauvinism and welfare populism divide the right more than the left. Electorates of not only green, but also most social democratic and radical left parties are consistently most opposed to discriminating welfare rights between natives and immigrants, although this opposition is weaker among left working-class voters than among left middle-class voters. Even voters of most mainstream right parties show only moderate support for welfare populism and welfare chauvinism, leaving the fervent support of radical right voters for welfare chauvinism and populism unmatched by any other electorate. These findings have important implications for the strategic situation of left parties and for understanding how welfare chauvinism and welfare populism may challenge welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the radical right political discourse on welfare chauvinistic attitudes over time. Using data from two rounds of the European Social Survey (2008/09 and 2016/17), the Comparative Political Data Set and the Manifesto Project for 17 European countries, our analyses show that radical right mobilization and the salience of political rhetoric framed on cultural diversity and immigration issues have a significant positive effect on welfare chauvinist attitudes. Although in the years after the Great Recession and the refugee crisis, welfare chauvinism remained fairly stable among the general European public, the influence of radical right mobilization and negative political discourse on welfare chauvinism has significantly increased. Furthermore, we find that when radical right parties become stronger and the political rhetoric regarding cultural diversity and immigration becomes more salient, differences in welfare chauvinist attitudes between people with different political affiliations become more polarized. These results contribute to a broader understanding of the mechanisms underlying welfare chauvinistic attitudes and mark the importance of the inclusion of political factors in studies on welfare chauvinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare chauvinism, that is, the exclusion of non-citizens who live permanently within a state from social benefits and services, has become a mainstream form of welfare policy opposition advocated by some political parties and members of the public. While existing studies have successfully cast a light on the roots and scope of these policies, welfare chauvinism effectively encompasses a wide range of ideas that all have different meanings. Drawing on the stances taken by populist radical right parties, this article introduces five categories (or frames) of welfare chauvinism: temporary, selective, functional, cultural and, in its most extreme form, unconditional chauvinism. The article then illustrates how such categorization is applied empirically by focusing on the stances taken by three populist radical right parties and open-ended discussions held during mini-publics in examples of three different institutional forms of welfare state: Denmark, Germany and the United Kingdom. This article offers a more precise depiction of how this form of opposition to welfare state policies plays out in the public sphere, taking full account of how different forms and frames of welfare chauvinism yield different policy outcomes and implications in different institutional and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether pensioners with a foreign ethnic background are perceived as less deserving to receive a pension than are native pensioners. It focuses on Germany as an example with a strongly achievement-oriented social insurance system which closely links benefits to previous contributions. Hence, the system prevents a citizen from receiving benefits without having contributed. Our study thus adds to existing research by examining a less likely case to find welfare chauvinistic attitudes. To test our expectations, we rely on a factorial survey design and a probability sample of the German population in 2019. Survey respondents decide on the amount of pension benefits that a hypothetical pensioner should receive. Characteristics of the hypothetical pensioner – ethnic background, gender, last income, contribution years, the number of children and other dependents – are randomly varied. Our study finds support for welfare chauvinist attitudes in an achievement-oriented social insurance system. Even for the same achievement, that is, same income, contribution years and number of children, natives grant lower pensions to pensioners with a foreign ethnic background than to natives. Also, even if migrants show the most favourable behaviour (that is, having contributed to the pension system for many years and with a high income), the ethnic penalty in pensions remains significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare deservingness opinions help explain welfare attitudes and hence are crucial for understanding the social legitimacy of the welfare state. However, even when considering deservingness alongside other explanatory frameworks, many open questions remain in the welfare attitude framework. This article argues that a novel research agenda focusing on welfare-state related knowledge and young people could considerably enrich current debates in deservingness and welfare attitude research. Deservingness assessments are made heuristically and could greatly depend on what people know (especially when they are misinformed). Studying this with young people is highly relevant, as the formative years are crucial for welfare attitude formation and change, even later in life. Research with young people provides unique opportunities for disentangling causal mechanisms between welfare-state related knowledge, deservingness and welfare attitudes. Moreover, it could help challenge welfare-state related misinformation and build resilience against disinformation. This thematic review outlines benefits, blind spots, and research trajectories when focusing on knowledge and young people in deservingness and welfare attitude research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social trust is a moral resource with a normatively highly desirable pay-off. Previous research argues that universal welfare state programmes 'make' social trust whereas means-testing programmes 'break' it. Despite its important implications for welfare-state design, comparative longitudinal evidence for this hypothesis is scarce. To test whether within-country changes in social trust are associated with within-country changes in total, means-tested, and non-means tested social protection expenditure, I thus merge country-year specific ESSPROS welfare spending data with cross-country survey data from 30 countries that participated in the 2002–2019 European Social Survey. Results from multilevel regression models show that neither within-country changes in total nor means-tested or non-means tested social protection expenditure predict social trust. Based on insights from the welfare deservingness literature, the second part of my analysis concentrates on welfare spending directed at two different life-course risks, with sickness representing a risk that the public widely considers to be 'deserving' of welfare support, and unemployment acting as an 'undeserving' risk. I find that, within countries over time, means-tested healthcare expenditures predict decreases in social trust, whereas non-means tested healthcare expenditure is associated with increasing social trust. My results thus lend support for the hypothesis that welfare-state selectivity and universality can contribute to the making and breaking of social trust, but only when interventions target life-course risks that the public considers 'deserving' of welfare state support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent enactment of the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR) has significantly strengthened the social dimension of the European Union (EU), including the social investment (SI) elements of that social dimension. What is not known, however, to what extent the priorization of SI is supported by the broader public. To address this research gap, we investigate public opinion on 15 different policy areas from the EPSR using Eurobarometer data from 2020 across all EU countries, asking whether the public rather prefers these policies to be delivered at EU or national level. A principal finding is that the public indeed supports more SI than CP policies with respect to EU-level social policy, and more CP than SI policies with respect to national-level social policy. We also investigate whether socioeconomic status (SES) and welfare state effort can explain this phenomenon. We find that higher socio-economic status and more generous welfare states are associated with more support for SI policies on both EU and national levels and vice versa. The findings emphasize the importance of what policies are provided versus who provides them but also pose a puzzle for trade-offs in multilevel governance settings. Hence, the article has important implications for future research on public opinion and Social Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights has reinvigorated the debate on the role that the European Union can exercise in the sphere of subjective rights. Such debate has traditionally focused on the limits of the current social acquis, considered unable to create fully-fledged European social citizenship, that ultimately remains limited to the right to reside and freely move within the EU and enjoy social rights as nationals. Conversely, this article argues that the gradual expansion of the EU's social acquis has slowly but clearly started to disconnect social rights from their exclusive national foundations, leading to the emergence of a new marble cake pattern of right production, which to a large extent reproduces the trajectory of federal polities. To capture this development, this article proposes an original analytical framework to dissect the notion of social rights as bundles of power resources (normative, instrumental and enforcement), which enable individuals to claim and actually receive material benefits in order to cope with a codified array of risks and needs. By shifting the attention from the formal dimension (laws and their enforcement) to its concrete practice (access and outputs), our conception connects the concept of social citizenship more directly to what ultimately matters for life chances (individualised material benefits) as well as for the social and political bonds of a community (the rights-based claim and experience of social protection). In so doing, we move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as the only producer of social entitlements and are able to appreciate the increasing relevance of the European Union as a provider of power resources and guarantor of policy outputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activation measures have assumed a prominent role within policy perspectives aimed at increasing labour market participation to support welfare sustainability. Most comparative studies on active labour market policies (ALMPs) have been conducted at the national level, although several scholars recently stressed the need to consider more carefully the territorial dimension of social policies. This article addresses this research gap by providing quantitative estimates of the territorial effect of national ALMPs provision on youth employment in European regions. We find that regional contextual traits, which can present a variety of configurations, play a significant role in moderating the effects of ALMPs. Divergent outcomes per type and level of education also highlight the complexity of the landscape for ALMPs' design and implementation. Our analysis helps identify the institutional and contextual conditions that require evaluation when designing and implementing policies targeting young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an age-group, young people are most at risk of poverty. Yet significant cross-national variation persists, which seems puzzling: the countries displaying the highest levels of youth poverty are (uncharacteristically) Nordic. How can such diversity be accounted for? Is the welfare state part of the story? First, I argue, unlike most studies, that in order to measure youth poverty it is better to use material deprivation and subjective poverty indicators, rather than income poverty. Second, I hypothesize that the welfare state has two potential routes to the alleviation of youth poverty. On the one hand, via 'individualization' of claims (allowing young people to claim benefits as full adult citizens), access to income support leads to lower levels of youth poverty. On the other, youth poverty levels can also be reduced through investment in young people's human capital, in line with the 'social investment' strategy. These claims are confirmed by multilevel logistic regressions on three waves and across 23 European countries of the Eurofound's European Quality of Life Survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare chauvinism is largely understood as the view that the benefits of the welfare state should primarily be given to the native population, and not shared with the immigrant populations. Using a multilevel approach, we analyse welfare chauvinism in Europe and test to see how different contextual and macro-economic conditions may influence welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe, with a particular focus on different nuances of unemployment. We also test how individuals' subjective perceptions of the economic development in their society may influence welfare chauvinism in Europe. The analysis finds that welfare chauvinistic attitudes have increased in strength in Central-Eastern European welfare states, whereas the most exclusionary form of welfare chauvinism is near non-existent in the Nordic welfare regimes. We further find that it is the subjective perceptions of the macro-economic conditions and the strength of far-right populism, rather than the actual objective reality of a society's economic situation that drives welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on the social policy–migration control link focuses on indirect control, that is, denying access to welfare. This article instead draws attention to how welfare institutions are made directly involved in migration control through duties to report certain categories of migrants to migration authorities. We ask how these obligations are put into practice and how local governments shape this process. In so doing, we place special emphasis on local organisational fields – that is, the close horizontal connection between public and non-public actors involved in basic needs provision. The article builds on exploratory research across four German cities, drawing on 61 interviews conducted in 2019–2020 with welfare actors catering to basic needs (housing/shelter, healthcare, social assistance, social counselling) and document research. Based on this, we, first, explore patterns of reporting practices and provide a typology of different responses, ranging from elaborate circumvention strategies to over-compliance. Second, we analyse the domino effects of reporting obligations, namely how welfare actors that are exempted from reporting adopt their practices too, with consequences both for migrants' welfare access and for other authorities' ability to report. Finally, we discuss how local governments can shape reporting practices, demonstrating how some cities actively sanction circumvention strategies. The last part identifies venues for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream western-centric welfare state research has mostly confined itself to studying social policy in consolidated democracies and tends to assume a synergy between democracy and the welfare state. This article shifts the focus to welfare states in countries with declining democratic institutions and rising right-wing populist rule to explore a complex relationship between (de)democratization and welfare state reforms. We conduct a comparative case study of two extreme cases of democratic decline, Turkey and Hungary. We employ a sequential mixed method approach. First, we assess welfare efforts in the two countries to understand which policy areas were prioritized and whether autocratizing governments retrenched or expanded their welfare states. In the second stage, we explore the trajectory of welfare reforms in Hungary and Turkey, focusing on three analytically distinguishable dimensions of social policy change: policy content, policy procedures (including timing, parliamentary procedures, veto players); and the discourses accompanying reforms. We find that democratic decline facilitates rapid welfare state change but it does not necessarily mean retrenchment. Instead we observe ambivalent processes of welfare state restructuring. Common themes emerging in both countries are the rise of flagship programmes that ensure electoral support, a transition towards top-down decision-making and the salient role of discourse in welfare governance. Overall, similarities are stronger in procedures and discourse than in the direction of reforms. Differences in spending levels and policy content do not suggest that the two cases constitute a coherent illiberal welfare state regime. Instead, we see the emergence of authoritarian features that modify their original welfare models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article maps the development and uses of the comparative method in academic research since the 1970s. It is based on an original database that we constructed for our review of 12,483 articles extracted from leading journals representing the disciplines of Social Policy, Political Science and Sociology. We proceed to a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reported comparative research effort. We find that the comparative method became mainstream in the 1990s – following the publication of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism and that JESP is the most comparative journal of all. In 2020, 66% of articles published in JESP are comparative. The comparative turn has been stronger in Social Policy than Sociology and Political Science over the last three decades. We witness a rise in the use of formal techniques (case studies and comparative historical analysis, SEM/factorial techniques, cluster analysis, QCA/Fuzzy-set) and mixed-methods in comparison to descriptive analysis, and this is particularly pronounced in Sociology. Regression analysis is dominant, however the most cited comparative articles are based on case studies and descriptive statistics. Overall, we argue that the comparative method is, in essence, 'a way of thinking' and not simply the application of a set of disparate techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature posits that mainstream right-wing parties have adopted restrictive positions on immigrants' entitlements to social rights to avoid losing votes to populist radical right-wing parties (PRRPs). Although studies recognize that this co-option is only partial, we know little about the remaining differences between PRRPs' and mainstream right-wing parties' welfare chauvinism strategies. This article fills this knowledge gap by comparing how mainstream and populist right-wing governments approach different migrant groups' entitlements to social rights. The article combines an event history analysis of the Determinants of International Migration Policy database with a qualitative examination of the indexation of family benefits in selected European Countries to compare PRRPs' and mainstream parties' impact on the social rights of different migrant groups. The results reveal that the main difference between PRRPs and mainstream right-wing parties in Western Europe is the formers' support for restrictions on intra-EU migrants' entitlements to social benefits. This finding has important implications for the study of the European social policy agenda, as PRRPs' increasing politicization of intra-EU migrants' access to social rights may compromise the future of intra-European solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redistribution is one of the main characteristics of the welfare state, and welfare state research has dealt intensely with various facets of it. The main focus in analysing redistribution is on the redistributive logics of welfare states in terms of work-related rights. Family as a major principle of welfare state redistribution, though, has hardly been included in these welfare state analyses. It has mainly been addressed by analysing outcome data or by analysing care as the most relevant characteristic of the family. We argue, though, that comparative welfare state analysis that addresses differences in welfare state intended redistribution needs to also include family as a redistributive principle to gain a more complete picture of societal redistribution. In this study, we are analysing the redistributive logics of welfare states in terms of family. We answer the question of how and in how far welfare states institutionalize family as a redistributive principle. We examine by means of the tax–benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD and its Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT) welfare state regulations on family for three countries that are generally classed as different regime types. We differentiate between a great variety of family forms (referring to marital status, children and different forms of couples' income distribution) to adequately test our theoretical assumptions. The findings show that family is a major redistributive principle of the welfare states analysed here and applied in different redistributive logics to the various family forms. This, then, results in an increase in income for certain family forms and a decrease in income for other family forms. These differences are not the result of one coherent set of regulations, but of an interplay of in part contradictory regulations that reflect a great variety of family-related redistributive logics within the single countries. Thus our study provides new insights into the redistributive logics of welfare states, and may contribute to the analysis of welfare state complexity in terms of theory, methodology and empirics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a static microsimulation model based on a link between survey and administrative data, this article investigates the effects of the pandemic on income distribution in Italy in 2020. The analysis focuses on both individuals and households by simulating through nowcasting techniques changes in labour income and in equivalized income, respectively. For both units of observations, we compare changes before and after social policy interventions, that is, automatic stabilizers and benefits introduced by the government to address the effects of the COVID-19 emergency. We find that the pandemic has led to a relatively greater drop in labour income for those lying in the poorest quantiles, which, however, benefited more from the income support benefits. As a result, compared with the 'No-COVID scenario', income poverty and inequality indices grow considerably when these benefits are not considered, whereas the poverty increase greatly narrows and inequality slightly decreases once social policy interventions are taken into account. This evidence signals the crucial role played by cash social transfers to contrast with the most serious economic consequences of the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have been working on revising their long-term care (LTC) policies to meet the increasing demand for care. Generally, little attention is paid to the potential (unintended) consequences of LTC policies for inequality among care users or informal caregivers. Saraceno previously explicitly argued that differences in care use and provision depend on the type of LTC policy, and that policies with contrasting consequences for inequality can be implemented at the same time. We call upon future research to empirically test the impact of different types of LTC policies on socio-economic inequalities in care. To stimulate and facilitate such research, our aims are to outline theoretical arguments for the differential impact of LTC policies on socio-economic inequalities in care and to create macro-level indicators for different types of supportive LTC policies in European countries over time. Our study's research question is: Can we find and capture different dimensions of LTC policies in macro-level indicators that are comparable over countries and time? In particular, we focus on supported familialism (for example, informal caregiver support), supported defamilialization through the market (for example, in-cash benefits for care users), and defamilialization through public provision (for example, availability of beds in residential care). Besides a summary of the literature on LTC policies and how they may affect socio-economic inequalities in care, we outline our search process for macro-level LTC indicators and present descriptive information on the different types of LTC policies and their correlations. We discuss the difficulties that arise when translating theoretical insights about different types of LTC policies into high-quality measures for many countries and time points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education has generally been excluded from the welfare discourse, especially in transition countries. This article addresses existing research gaps by applying the ideas of decommodification and stratification to higher education in post-Soviet countries, within the comparative framework of welfare regime typology. The purpose of this study is to analyse the extent to which higher education relates to welfare state models in such countries. The research demonstrates that institutional settings and outcomes of higher education provision in Estonia, Georgia and Russia are evolving toward patterns of social-democratic, liberal and conservative models, respectively. Although the correspondence is incomplete, we argue that post-Soviet states are more similar to groups of countries representing these welfare regimes than to each other. This study argues against the assumption of a uniform post-Soviet pattern of higher education policy and shows that its structuring is embedded in the wider context of national welfare state models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do welfare state policies affect the political support for environmental action of economically vulnerable social groups? Two competing hypotheses can be delineated. On the one hand, a synergy logic would imply that welfare state generosity is associated with higher support for environmental action among economically vulnerable groups due to the insecurity reducing effects of the welfare state. On the other hand, a crowding-out logic would suggest that welfare state generosity is associated with lower support for other policy priorities like environmental action. We test these two hypotheses using 2019 Eurobarometer survey data and country-level indicators of welfare state generosity in 22 European countries. We find that the working class and the elderly are particularly opposed to individual and national environmental action and that the welfare state plays a complex moderating role. Consistent with a synergy logic, welfare state generosity increases pro-environmental behaviour among the working class, but its association with more positive attitudes towards national environmental policies is less strong. Consistent with a crowding-out logic, the elderly appear less likely to behave in environmentally friendly ways if retirement benefits are high. To explore the mechanisms behind this association, we show that the working class who struggle to pay their bills are most opposed to environmental action. Overall, economic insecurities are key obstacles for support of environmental actions and the effects of the welfare state depend both on which social group is concerned and whether individual behaviour versus policy preferences are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, European welfare states have adopted demanding active labour market policies (ALMPs), aimed at increasing labour market participation through imposing stricter work-related obligations and benefit cuts in case of job offer rejection. This article investigates whether support for such demanding ALMPs is driven by risk perceptions of future unemployment and negative stereotypes about unemployed persons. Insights into the role of risk perceptions and stereotypes offer opportunities to gain a better understanding of the impact of structural variables. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey 2016 in 21 European countries, the analysis reveals that higher subjective risk of unemployment decreases support for these ALMPs substantially, whereas negative perceptions of the unemployed increase support. However, these factors play at the individual level only and do not explain country-level differences in support of demanding ALMPs. The notable cross-national variation in support of activation policies is found to be unrelated to economic factors and to the strictness of activation requirements for unemployment benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of emergent emphases on how climate change will affect welfare societies, welfare policies and individuals' welfare and vice versa, this study investigates public support for welfare and environmental policies and concerns. Since previous research and literature have pointed towards a socioeconomic divide between the welfare agenda and the environmental agenda in terms of public support, this article makes a thorough socioeconomic analysis of public welfare and environmental attitudes. The article analyses data from an original study in the context of Sweden (n = 1529). Through multinomial logistic regression analysis this study investigates if and which socioeconomic factors increase the likelihood of expressing mutual support for welfare and environmental policies and concerns compared to expressing support for welfare or environmental policies and concerns in isolation, as well as no support at all. The results indicate that both low and high socioeconomic status factors increase the likelihood of expressing mutual welfare and environmental support. These factors are low - to middle-range income levels, high educational attainment and low - to high-status occupations. Accordingly, this study finds that individuals expressing mutual welfare and environmental support are less easily placed in the low to high socioeconomic continuum. This suggests that we need to go beyond the two established theoretical perspectives of self-interest and personal capabilities when explaining mutual welfare and environmental support and, for example, direct the attention to factors and theoretical points of departure that take post-materialism and non-economic dimensions into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature concerning active labour market policy (ALMP) in advanced economies during the post-Fordist Age is very informative. Nevertheless, surprisingly, we know little about ALMP politicization. By focusing on two archetypes of the Mediterranean countries, Italy and Spain, this study argues that the geographical distribution of social stratification affects ALMP politicization at the national level. Analysing the party manifestos of the main nationwide parties in the most recent electoral turnouts (2013–2019), this article shows that while the issue is highly politicized in Spain, it is almost completely neglected in Italy. We demonstrate that when outsiderness is concentrated in a delimited geographical area, as in Italy, it hinders ALMP politicization on a national level, since it becomes a regional issue. On the contrary, when it is spread across the whole national territory, as in Spain, ALMP politicization is more likely, since the issue is nationally relevant. However, the concentration of outsiders is not sufficient to trigger a change in the electoral competition dynamic and the intervening effect of policy legacy may enhance or constrain ALMP politicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal uncertainty may hinder the effective implementation of public policies. Still, the political and legal dynamics that underpin its persistence are underexplored. This article proposes that legal uncertainty is more likely to persist in multi-level political and legal systems where actors with authority on the same issue hold different interpretations of rules. Also, it suggests that, under these conditions, actors can use legal uncertainty as an opportunity to advance their own interests. We illustrate this argument by investigating the legal uncertainty concerning EU citizens' access to social benefits in Germany. Through the analysis of social legislation and courts' rulings, the article shows that different interpretations of EU law by domestic actors hindered the possibilities of settling uncertainty: national courts of different levels used litigation processes and referrals to the Court of Justice of the European Union to advance their legal interpretations and the German government profited from the uncertainty to exclude EU citizens from social benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution investigates public attitudes toward providing financial help to the self-employed, a less well-researched area in the otherwise vibrant literature on welfare state attitudes. We analyse to what extent the self-employed themselves soften their general anti-statist stance in times of need, and how the public thinks about supporting those who usually tend to oppose government interventions. To answer these questions, we study public attitudes towards providing financial aid to the self-employed during the lockdowns adopted in response to the COVID pandemic in Switzerland, using survey data collected in the spring and in the autumn of 2020. The results show that most respondents favour the provision of financial support. In addition, the self-employed are the staunchest supporters of the more generous forms of help, like non-refundable payments. We conclude that, when exposed to significant economic risk, need and interests override ideological preferences for less state intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experiences of unaccompanied young migrants and refugees challenge the idea of a common European asylum policy but also show that traditional welfare typologies used to account for differences in welfare across states fail to account for the lived experiences of this group. They do not consider the shifting categorizations of young migrants in institutional terms, nor how the stratification of their social rights plays out over place and time. Moreover, current welfare typologies give inadequate attention to the increasing intersection of the labour market and opportunities for regularization, the relative importance and role of the state in the welfare mix, and the nexus of access to welfare and immigration enforcement. This article draws on qualitative longitudinal research in England and Italy to argue that rather than experiencing welfare through the lens of Liberal (England) versus Conservative or Mediterranean (Italy) regimes, unaccompanied young migrants and refugees in these countries are better understood as navigating different systems of 'iron rod welfare' and 'colander welfare'. In England, the nexus between welfare and legal status is policed by an iron rod on one side of which exists a plethora of social rights, but on the other the risk of a proactive detention and deportation regime. In Italy, meanwhile, the holes of the colander denote gaps in protection but also possibilities to navigate alternative welfare strategies independently of the state. The ability to act independently of the state is an important but under-theorized capability for this population, for whom the state is a more ambiguous actor than is traditionally considered in European social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activation as a social policy topic has been investigated since the late 1990s and continues to be popular in academic analysis and discourse. In this review, we highlight the wide range of research aims and themes covered within relevant publications. We also identify a considerable degree of conceptual inconsistency and ambiguity across the literature. Informed by methodological considerations, we conclude by suggesting a parsimonious root concept of activation which would allow for a more consistent and less ambiguous application within and across different levels of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Minimum income schemes aim at providing citizens with a minimum living standard. In some EU countries, their regulation and provision takes place at the subnational level. This is the case in Spain, where minimum income schemes are a heterogeneous and complex collection of regional benefits designed and implemented at the regional level, by the Autonomous Communities. In June 2020, a complementary nationwide minimum income scheme was implemented. In this context, we use the European microsimulation model EUROMOD, together with microdata from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, to comprehensively assess the performance of the whole minimum income system. We simulate a sequence of theoretical scenarios, considering different degrees of coverage and adequacy of these benefits and show that extending the coverage of the regional schemes would significantly alleviate poverty. However, it would not be sufficient to eliminate it and further increases in the benefit amounts would also be required. Furthermore, the new nationwide minimum income can potentially reduce the shortfall in income from the poverty line, if cost-shifting practices from the regional to the national budgetary level are limited. We discuss the importance of this case study in light of the decentralization of minimum income policies and derive some general policy implications. JEL classification: H53, H75, I38. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an enormous challenge for healthcare systems around the globe. Using original panel survey data for the case of Germany, this article studies how specific trust in the healthcare system to cope with this crisis has evolved during the course of the pandemic and whether this specific form of trust is associated with general political trust. The article finds strong evidence for a positive and robust association between generalized political trust and performance perceptions regarding the efficiency and fairness of the crisis response as well as individual treatment conditions. The article also shows that specific trust in healthcare remained relatively stable throughout 2020, but declined significantly in the spring of 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public policies supporting families with children differ among countries but with the same goal of improving the well-being of children. Using a microsimulation model, this article assesses the cash support which families receive for their children in Croatia, Greece, Germany, the Slovak Republic, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The impact of policies across the income distribution on different family sizes, child-rearing cost compensation and child poverty is estimated. A method for the calculation of child-contingent payments for each child by order of birth in the family is proposed as a complementary indicator of policy design. The results confirm that a combination of universal and targeted support (either from family or social assistance benefits) is the most effective in poverty reduction and cost compensation. While high support for larger families greatly reduces poverty, generous universal or even lower support for large families has proved to be at least equally effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the theoretical discussion of the historical legitimacy of single mothers by examining the construction of relationships between single motherhood and welfare policy. Specifically, the study analyses the changing discourse regarding single mothers, and the social policy designed for them, in the US, UK and Israel from the 1970s to the 2000s. These three countries are similar in terms of the embeddedness, extension and institutionalization of neoliberal ideology in their welfare policies and public discourse, together with welfare legislation affecting single mothers, yet they differ in terms of policy implementation and the history of policy development. The study examines institutional intersectionality along with cultural perceptions of single mothers in each country. Looking at both the development and the withdrawal of social rights over time, we deepen understanding of how the image of the single mother is created in the neoliberal welfare regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'welfare chauvinism' has achieved a certain currency in social science research and is used widely. Yet, the concept is not without its critics, who claim that welfare chauvinism is 'loaded' or 'ambiguous'. This article reviews empirical studies of welfare chauvinism, from the 1990s to the present day, drawing primarily from party politics and attitudes research. We identify differences in how the concept is used, defined, operationalized and measured. We emphasize the importance of a unified language, operationalization and measurement, and identify promising directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We measure and interpret the evolution of labour market protection across 21 high-income countries over three decades, employing as conceptual foundations the 'regime varieties' and 'trajectories of change' developed by Esping-Andersen, Estevez-Abe, Hall and Soskice, and Thelen. We measure labour market protection considering four institutional dimensions – employment protection, unemployment protection, income maintenance and activation – and the evolution of the workforce composition. This measurement accounts for the joint evolution of labour market institutions, their complementarities and their relation to outcomes, and mitigate the unrealistic Average Production Worker assumption. We handle the multi-dimensional nature of labour market protection with Principal Component Analysis and capture the characteristics of countries' trajectories of change with a composite score. We contribute to the literature in three ways. (1) We portray a revised typology that accounts for processes of change between 1990 and 2015, and that clusters regime varieties on the basis of coordination and solidarity levels, that is, Central/Northern European, Southern European, liberal. (2) We illustrate that, despite a persistent gap, a large majority of Coordinated Market Economies experiencing a decline in the level of labour market protection became more similar to Liberal Market Economies. (3) We develop a fivefold taxonomy of countries' trajectories of change (liberalization, dualization, flexibility, de-dualization and higher protection), showing that these trajectories are not always path-dependent and consistent with regime varieties previously developed in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What welfare state regimes are observed when the analysis is extended globally, empirically and theoretically? We introduce a novel perspective into the 'welfare state regimes analyses' – a perspective that brings developed and developing countries together and, as such, broadens the geographical, empirical and theoretical scope of the 'welfare modelling business'. The expanding welfare regimes literature has suffered from several drawbacks: (i) it is radically slanted towards organisation for economic co-operation and development (OECD) countries, (ii) the literature on non-OECD countries does not use genuine welfare policy variables and (iii) social assistance and healthcare programmes are not utilized as components of welfare state effort and generosity. To overcome these limitations, we employ advanced data reduction methods, exploit an original dataset (https://glow.ku.edu.tr/) that we assembled from several international and domestic sources covering 52 emerging markets and OECD countries and present a welfare state regime structure as of the mid-2010s. Our analysis is based on genuine welfare policy variables that are theorized to capture welfare generosity and welfare efforts across five major policy domains: old-age pensions, sickness cash benefits, unemployment insurance, social assistance and healthcare. The sample of OECD countries and emerging market economies form four distinct welfare state regime clusters: institutional, neoliberal, populist and residual. We unveil the composition and performance of welfare state components in each welfare state regime family and develop politics-based working hypotheses about the formation of these regimes. Institutional welfare state regimes perform high in social security, healthcare and social assistance, while populist regimes perform moderately in social assistance and healthcare and moderate-to-high in social security. The neoliberal regime performs moderately in social assistance and healthcare, and it performs low in social security, and the residual regime performs low in all components. We then hypothesize that the relative political strengths of formal and informal working classes are key factors that shaped these welfare state regime typologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates whether generous family policies at the transition to parenthood reduce single and partnered mothers' economic disadvantages later in the life course. Previous research usually focused on the immediate effects of family policies and disregards potential longer-term effects. In this study, we suggest taking a life-course perspective to study the relationships between family policy and mothers' poverty risks. We empirically investigate how investment in child benefits, childcare services and parental leave measures at the transition to parenthood are associated with poverty outcomes at later life stages and whether these associations hold over time. We draw on pooled EU-SILC data, and an original policy dataset based on OECD expenditure data for child benefits, childcare and parental leave from 1994 to 2015. We find that mothers' observed increase in poverty over time is slower in countries with high levels of spending for childcare at the transition to parenthood than in lower spending countries. The gap between partnered and single mothers was also diminishing in contexts of high childcare expenditure. For the other two policies, we did not find these links. These results do lend support to the claim that childcare is a prime example of a social investment policy with returns later in the life course and represents a life-course policy that seems to be able to disrupt economic path dependencies. The results for the other two policies suggest, however, a limited potential of family policy spending at transition to parenthood to reduce the poverty gap between partnered and single mothers over the course of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy access biases worry social policy scholars because they generate Matthew effects that exacerbate socioeconomic divides. Yet, access biases in many social investment policies, like training during unemployment, remain under-researched. Such access biases may be detrimental to a critical objective of social investment: to improve and uplift workers with precarious economic prospects. We focus here on access bias in training provided by public employment services against lower-educated workers. They are vulnerable to unemployment and fractured employment and should thus be targeted for training. While there is burgeoning attention on access biases in training against disadvantaged youths and non-citizens, fewer studies have focused on similar access bias against lower-educated workers. We highlight that access bias against such workers may stem from their lower willingness and demand for training, as well as policy design, informal eligibility criteria and caseworkers' creaming practices. We suggest, however, that greater availability of training opportunities may ease this access bias against lower-educated workers. Using the Finnish Income Distribution survey data (2007–2012), we find evidence of training access bias: primary-educated workers are significantly less likely to participate in training than upper secondary and vocationally educated workers. Concurrently, our results show that availability of training is not significantly associated with the extent of training access bias against primary-educated workers. With a Nordic welfare model that prioritizes training to remedy labour market vulnerability and stresses that access to benefits and services is based on need, Finland represents a least likely case to find such access bias in training. We therefore consider these results worrying: if it is found here, it may be prevalent in countries with other welfare models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade of writing on the politics of flat-rate tax adoption and diffusion across post-socialist Europe and Asia has presented these reforms as revolutionary, but at least bold. However, in what ways they might have proven so and for whom has not been investigated. Based on a micro-level study of actual personal income tax rates for the 1991–2018 period, the article engages critically with the scope of the flat tax 'revolution' in three different flat tax nations, early adopter Lithuania, later-adopter Romania and recent-adopter Hungary. The analysis shows that the introduction of flat-rate tax in no way revolutionised actual tax burdens for the majority of earners, not even for high-income earners, whose tax burdens had been declining for at least a decade before the arrival of flat tax in both Romania and Hungary. The article also reveals the crucial role played by standard tax credits in shaping tax regime progressivity not only in flat tax regimes, but also progressive ones. The article suggests that the novelty of policy ideas cannot be assumed, but needs to rest on comparisons of outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the most potent hypothesis in political economy, the negative impact of ethnic diversity on the provision of public goods made the welfare state–nation state isomorphism seem a one-way connection. Against the grain of existing studies I argue, through a case-study of interwar Romania, that welfare states are constructed to proactively (re)build the nation, rather than retroactively emanate from it, once established. Rather than an ahistorical ethnolinguistic fractionalization, the article takes nationhood as historically fluid and contested because through institutionalized action, elites can and do proactively revamp the political arena, redistributing coalitions of winners and losers based on exogenously given criteria. The article therefore shows that nation forgers typically internalize the global social question through the topoi of local socio-economic problems construed as a national question. Because elites can pick and choose who becomes part of the national compact, the politicization of the perception of incomplete nationhood provides a sufficient ideational thrust for welfare policymaking, irrespective of pre-existing national solidarities. Consequently, welfare policies are typically layered as remedial or compensatory policies designed to foster a specific social mobility, deemed in a top-down fashion to be completing the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the conventional view of over three decades of research on the welfare state, the postwar success of solidaristic welfare reform depended on the left's ability to 'tailor' to middle-class interests or at least 'synthesize' working- and middle-class demands. This article offers a different perspective on the dynamics of postwar solidaristic welfare reform. It argues that key middle-class groups such as skilled wage earners often had a strong incentive to oppose such reform but were not always well-positioned to do so. The article distinguishes between two main avenues through which they could exert political influence and argues that their ability to mobilize against solidaristic welfare reform depended primarily on the structure of the labour union movement. The article illustrates its claims by contrasting the postwar success of solidaristic old-age pension reform in Belgium and the Netherlands with its failure in Britain and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article theorises how covering social risks through cash transfers and in-kind services shapes public attitudes towards including/excluding immigrants from these programmes in Western European destination countries. The argument is that public attitudes are more restrictive of granting immigrants access to benefits than to services. This hypothesis is tested across ten social protection programmes using original survey data collected in Denmark, Germany and the UK in 2019. Across the three countries, representing respectively a social democratic, conservative and liberal welfare regime context, the article finds that the public does indeed have a preference for easier access for in-kind services than for cash benefits. The article also finds these results to be stable across programmes covering the same social risks; the examples are child benefits and childcare. The results are even stable across left-wing, mainstream and radical right-wing voters; with the partial exception of radical right-wing voters in the UK. Finally, the article finds only a moderate association between individual characteristics and attitudinal variation across cash benefits and in-kind services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This thematic review essay focuses on the relationship between social inclusion and collective skill formation systems. It briefly surveys foundational literature in comparative political economy and comparative social policy that documented and explained the traditionally socially inclusive nature of these systems. It reviews how the literature conceptualized the current challenges faced by collective skill formation systems in upholding their inclusive nature in the context of the transition to post-industrial societies. It then discusses in detail a recent strand of literature that investigates the policy responses that have been deployed across countries to deal with these challenges. It concludes by providing heuristics that may be useful for researchers who seek to advance the study of the policy and politics of social inclusion in collective skill formation systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and policymakers who call for social investment (SI) policies hope that SI policies reduce income inequality and poverty, among other policy goals. Meanwhile, some others point out potentially less pro-poor effects of SI policies. There are relatively few cross-national studies that empirically examine the distributional effects of SI policies. The current study seeks to fill the gap by investigating the effects of SI policies on income inequality in OECD countries. The empirical analysis finds mixed results. Parental leave benefits reduce market income inequality, but other family support policies do not lessen inequality, and family allowances and paid leave (the length of generous leave) even increase it. The effects of some family policies are partly context-specific. In contexts where there are a large number of single-mother households, parental leave benefits reduce market income inequality. There is no stable evidence that education and active labour market policy (ALMP) reduce market income inequality. Education and ALMP, however, reduce disposable income inequality (even after controlling for left governments and Nordic countries). The article suggests that in countries with high education and/or ALMP spending, the skills of workers towards the lower end of the income distribution may be relatively high (even though their pre-tax and transfer income may be low), and it may make their income salvageable with redistributive policies. In this sense, SI policies and conventional redistributive policies may be complementary in reducing disposable income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How to determine whether mobile Union citizens have a right to social assistance? Research has shown how Western European Member States have made efforts to restrict Union citizens' access to their welfare systems over the past decade, whereby lawful residence has increasingly become the linchpin for entitlement. Member States have responded strikingly differently, however, to the complex administrative puzzle of dealing with open borders, the ability to verify lawful residence and the right to social assistance over time. This article makes an analytical and empirical contribution to existing literature by asking how Member States adjust their welfare/migration administrations to fit the Union's free movement regime and what implications this has for Union citizens. Based upon comparative case studies into the administration of social assistance rights in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, the article develops a typology of three different models of administering Union citizens' access to the welfare state: the form, signal and delegation models. Demonstrating how bureaucratic design impacts the stratification of social rights in the Member States in different ways, the article concludes that studying alternative administrative models offers important insights into the functioning of territorial welfare states in open border regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young EU citizens are encouraged to enhance their 'employability' by taking advantage of intra-EU mobility, but, for many, moving to another EU country can instead generate disadvantages in the labour market. Drawing on a qualitative study on the experiences of university-educated young Nordics and southern Europeans working in precarious jobs in Brussels, we examine how their access to income support in the context of mobility shapes their access to financial independence. We argue that the variation in European welfare models regarding young peoples' social entitlements impacts this access in multiple and complex ways. The article advances a tripartite approach that looks at the regulation and enforcement of conditionality of social entitlements on the levels of EU, their country of origin and their country of destination. The analysis shows how, in Belgium, precarious EU migrant citizens are denied access to income support due to the interplay between general welfare conditionality for all claimants and recently reinforced conditionality affecting EU migrant citizens in particular. In these situations, the de-familialising Nordic welfare models showed an aptitude for shielding their young citizens. The young southern Europeans, on the other hand, often had no access to income support in any country, which forced them to choose between family dependency and unfiltered exposure to precarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy research is truly interdisciplinary with academics from very different theoretical perspectives working together in fervent open-mindedness towards diverse methodological approaches. The exploration of social investment (SI) welfare provision is a clear example of this spirit of interdisciplinary engagement, having stirred up critical scholarly reception and debate over the past decade. On the one hand, some colleagues underscore the potential of SI policies to improve life chances. On the other hand, some researchers voice concerns about perverse unintended consequences of SI. The most worrying scholarly critique of SI is the conjecture that SI policies reinforce rather than alleviate inequality and poverty, because of the operation of so-called Matthew effects (MEs). Parolin and Van Lancker's commentary on our article 'The social investment litmus test: family formation, employment and poverty' falls within the purview of the ME critique, with some extension to other shortcomings discussed in the literature. These criticisms certainly deserve engagement, and we are grateful to the editorial board of the Journal of European Social Policy for inviting us to do so fully. In our commentary, we commence with the multidimensionality of 21st-century welfare state provision. Subsequently, we turn to the welfare state's carrying capacity, which we maintain needs to be taken into consideration for leveraging positive feedback mechanisms between the micro and the macro level of welfare provision. By so doing, we elaborate on the implications of our research approach for understanding MEs, with insights as to how they are exacerbated or mitigated through policy (in-)complementarities. We then discuss the importance of considering synergies between policies for an improved understanding of SI returns and possible source(s) of MEs. Finally, we turn to the misconception that capacitating SI policies and compensatory consumption-smoothing and poverty alleviation are somehow in competition with each other, and discuss the normative orientation underlying SI welfare provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to examine if and how the welfare state regime typology translates into a violence regime typology in a European context. It builds on the concept of violence regimes (Strid et al. 2017; Hearn et al. 2020) to empirically examine whether the production of interpersonal violence constitutes distinct regimes, and how these correspond (or not) with welfare regimes, gender regimes, and with other comparative metrics on violence, gender equality and feminist mobilisation and transnational actors. Its main contribution is to operationalise the concept of violence regimes, thereby moving from theory to a first empirical measurement. By first constructing a new composite measure of violence, a Violence Regimes Index, based on secondary administrative and survey data covering the then 28 EU member states, countries are clustered along two axes of violence: 'deadly' violence and 'damaging' gender-based violence. This serves to examine if, and how, the production of gendered violence in different states constitutes distinct regimes, analogous to welfare state regimes, as well as to enable future research and further comparisons and contrasts, specifically related to violence and the welfare state. By providing an empirical measurement of violence regimes in the EU, the article then contributes further to the debates on welfare, welfare regimes, and violence. It specifically contributes with discussions on the extent to which there are different violence regimes, comparable to welfare regimes, and with discussions on the relevance of moving from thinking about violence as an institution within other inequality regimes, to thinking about violence as a macro-regime, a way of governing and ruling in its own right. The article concludes that the exclusion of violence from mainstream social theory and research has produced results that may not be valid, and offers an alternative classification using the concept of violence regimes, thereby demonstrating the usefulness of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]