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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]

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 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]

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]

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]

We assess how a variety of disruptive life-course events impact the economic wellbeing of US households and trace the importance of household wealth in helping families who experience these events avoid entering a spell of material hardship. Using longitudinal data from two panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we draw on direct measures of material hardship, disruptive events and household assets. Our analyses reveal that the relationship between disruptive events and the likelihood of experiencing a new spell of material hardship strongly varies across the wealth distribution, suggesting that high household wealth provides an effective private safety net. By distinguishing different types of disruptive events, we demonstrate that divorce, disability and income loss entail a risk of material hardship but also that this risk is effectively buffered by substantial wealth. Different types of hardship – namely, financial, food and medical hardship – respond in similar ways. Like public insurance schemes, wealth insurance helps buffer the effects of disruptive events on material hardship, but unlike public insurance schemes, reliance on private wealth further stratifies the economic wellbeing of households. Policy options for addressing this highly stratified private insurance scheme include disposing of the need for it by funding more robust public insurance, for instance through wealth taxation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue looks at wealth in relation to social policy from a variety of perspectives. The articles all shed an innovative light on wealth in relation to a range of topics relevant for social policy researchers. This introduction provides an overview of the papers in this special issue and then highlights some of the gaps and shortcomings that remain. We conclude with some reflections on what this means for the future of social policy and research on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the past decade, the notion that social policy should be applied as a tool to enhance the productive capacity of families, rather than to smooth consumption, has gained considerable traction under the moniker of social investment (SI). Against lingering critiques of the usefulness of SI research, Plavgo and Hemerijck primarily present bivariate, cross-sectional correlations of national-level outcomes to provide what they call a 'social investment litmus test'. They conclude that SI policies are effective at achieving 'positive returns in employment and poverty mitigation'. They also present evidence to suggest that 'passive' income supports are not effective at reducing poverty and promoting employment. Given the importance of their claims and the pre-eminence of SI in recent social policy literature, we feel compelled to respond and clarify that the authors' findings do not support their conclusions. In doing so, we (1) review the central claims from the authors' study, (2) provide evidence as to why the authors' findings do not support their claims of a 'social investment litmus test', and (3) propose a path forward for a more critical assessment of the performance of policies labelled as SI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Means-tested transfer schemes in Europe and elsewhere tend to include not only income tests but also asset tests of various sorts. The role of asset tests in minimum income protection provisions has been extensively researched in the Anglo-Saxon context. Far fewer authors have assessed the role of asset tests on social policy in a continental European context. Although asset tests may be useful in singling out the more deserving of the poor, we know relatively little of their actual impact on eligibility and social outcomes in European welfare states. This paper looks at the prevalence and design of asset tests in European minimum income protection schemes. We distinguish between two main types of asset tests: outright disqualification when assets reach a certain value, versus a more gradual tapering at a fictional rate of return. We then analyse in greater detail how asset tests in Belgium and Germany, as representatives of these two types, affect minimum income protection eligibility and poverty outcomes. We use the EUROMOD microsimulation model on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey data in order to assess the effects of asset tests. This survey was explicitly designed to more realistically reflect assets and capital incomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social policy falls predominantly under national rather than European Union (EU) jurisdiction, there are nonetheless multiple ways in which social policy and social outcomes in EU member states have been affected by EU membership. This paper draws on existing evidence and analysis to review the consequences for UK social policy of the decision to leave the EU. We focus predominantly on the implications of the British government's pledge to 'take back control' of money, borders and laws. Our conclusion is that Brexit is likely to have negative effects on the quality of public services and, for some groups in particular, social rights, and that these effects are likely to be greater the more distant are the future trading and wider relationships between the UK and the EU27. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that European citizens share consistent attitudes towards the relative deservingness of different target groups of social policy, such as perceiving elderly people as most deserving, unemployed people as less deserving and immigrants as least deserving. Yet, it is unclear which criteria people apply when making these judgements. In this article, we explore the reasoning behind deservingness judgements. We analyse how four focus groups – from the middle class, the working class, young people and elderly people – discuss and rank various vignettes representing welfare target groups. Our focus groups' rankings mirror the well-established rank order of welfare target groups, and we also introduce further target groups: median-income families, low-income earners, and well-off earners. Our analyses of reasoning patterns show that depending on the target group specific combinations of deservingness criteria suggested in the literature (e.g. need, reciprocity, identity, control) are applied, and we suggest adding a further criterion emphasizing future returns on invested resources ('social investment'). Furthermore, by comparing focus groups, we find that different groups back up similar rankings by differing criteria, suggesting that below the surface of a 'common deservingness culture' linger class and other differences in perceiving welfare deservingness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the two world wars on welfare legislation in 16 western countries. We use Poisson regressions to test our hypothesis that war was a catalyst of welfare legislation, especially in countries that were heavily exposed to the dreadful effects of war. By welfare legislation, we mean the inaugural adoption and major reforms across four programmes (old age and disability benefits, sickness and maternity benefits, unemployment compensation and family allowances). Our findings suggest that both world wars are key factors for explaining the timing of comprehensive welfare reforms and outweigh the significance of other factors such as regime type or level of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates whether declining or sluggish growth in earnings for low-wage workers contributes to declining levels of minimum income protections. Starting from the observation of lacklustre growth in minimum income protections, this article introduces a framework to conceptualize the tensions facing modern welfare states in their attempt to (1) provide poverty-alleviating minimum incomes, (2) achieve employment growth and (3) keep spending levels in check. We argue that, due to downward pressure on low gross wages compared to median household incomes, it has become more difficult to balance each of those three objectives. Estimation results from country-year panel data suggest that declines in minimum wages (or low gross wages) are associated with declines in minimum income protections for the jobless. When growth in minimum income protections does exceed growth in low gross wages, we find that welfare states also increase gross-to-net effort to subsidize the net income of low-wage earners. We argue that these findings point towards a 'structural inadequacy' around minimum income protections for the jobless. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Employment Equality Framework Directive (EED) is the first and still the only EU law that requires EU member states to combat sexual orientation discrimination. It requires states to change employment laws or draft news ones that prevent employers and coworkers from discriminating against gay and lesbian employees. Implementation of the EED was problematic, despite strong support for the law among many EU member states and their publics. An analysis of the EED's provisions shows that in countries where religious organizations provide a substantial share of a country's social services, governments are more likely to transpose the directive incorrectly. These findings are based on an innovative research design that addresses one legal subject matter within a directive. Contradicting earlier research showing it has little to no role, public opinion about an EU law can affect compliance. This article also sheds more light on how religious organizations and beliefs affect European integration, comparatively understudied in the literature. These findings also have important implications for the future of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights legislation at the EU level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the nexus of globalization, welfare systems and income inequality, in which a key theme is the assessment of how the distributional consequences of globalization are altered by the welfare benefit programmes of advanced welfare states. Existing literature contends that globalization is one of the principle reasons for the current increases in income inequality in developed economies. However, the distributional effects of globalization can vary across disparate national contexts. The study investigates whether welfare systems successfully compensate those who are displaced by external competition while reducing the income inequalities caused by globalization. For the empirical analysis, both random- and fixed-effects models with cluster-robust standard errors are utilized, as are comprehensive measures of globalization, welfare policy and income inequality. The results from 16 affluent democracies between 1980 and 2010 show that some aspects of globalization were significantly related to increased income inequality; however, the relationship was also significantly moderated by generous welfare benefit programmes. These findings support the argument that welfare systems play a critical role in compensating for the rising income inequalities caused by globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debate around a universal basic income (UBI) tends to focus on the economic and social implications of the policy proposal. Less clear, however, are the factors influencing support for a UBI. Using the 2016 European Social Survey, we investigate how trade union membership and left political ideology (central to power resources theory) and attitudes towards immigrants' access to welfare benefits (central to welfare state chauvinism) affect individual support for a UBI. We also investigate how country-level differences in levels of social spending moderate individual-level UBI support. Results from multi-level models suggest that a broader coalition of UBI supporters can generally be found in countries where social spending is low. Specifically, we find that welfare state chauvinism is more likely to be associated with negative attitudes towards a UBI in countries with high levels of spending, but has only a weak association with UBI support in low-spending countries. Similarly, political ideology is more consequential in explaining UBI support in countries with higher levels of spending. These tensions form a demand–capacity paradox: the countries which are presumably least equipped to implement a UBI see the most broad-based support for the policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews conducted between 2013 and 2015 with childcare workers and their employers, this article focuses on the employment of paid home-based childcare in Slovakia, where local families prefer to employ local childcarers, rather than migrant childcarers. After a brief discussion of previous studies on home-based paid childcare and social policies, I introduce the concept of care loops and summarize familyoriented policies in Slovakia. I explain that relying on social networks and trust results in hiring local women rather than migrant childcarers. I then examine the motivations of working mothers for hiring childcare workers. I show how mothers use both structural (social policy) and cultural factors (ideals of motherhood and childrearing) to explain their childcare choices. I argue that hiring full-time childcare workers is both a way to fill the care gap and a response to a cultural preference for mother-like care for infants and toddlers. This cultural preference also results in hiring part-time childcare workers who are responsible for micromobilities of care and who help parents to manage care loops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts contemporary debates about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state in historical perspective. Relying on new historical data, the article examines the relationship between immigration policy and social policy in Western Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the modern welfare state emerged. Germany already had comparably strict immigration policies when the German Empire introduced the world's first national social insurances in the 1880s. Denmark, another early social-policy adopter, also pursued restrictive immigration policies early on. Almost all other countries in Western Europe started out with more liberal immigration policies than Germany's and Denmark's, but then adopted more restrictive immigration policies and more generous social policies concurrently. There are two exceptions, Belgium and Italy, which are discussed in the article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study applies improved household income data to measure and decompose trends in pan-European income inequality from 2006 to 2014. To contrast the relative significance of economic homogeneity versus the efficacy of welfare state and labour market institutions in shaping income distributions, we compare the structure of inequality in the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU-28) to that of the 50 United States. This comparison stands in contrast to the standard practice of evaluating the United States against individual EU Member States. Despite the greater relative heterogeneity of the EU-28 and our corrections for the underreporting of household income in the United States, post-fisc income inequality in the EU-28 remains lower than that of the United States from 2006 onward. Moreover, inequality appears to be rising in the United States, while it has remained stagnant since 2008 in the EU-28. In both unions, and particularly the United States, within-state income differences contribute more to union-wide inequality than between-state differences. In a counterfactual analysis, we find that if the EU-28 matched the between-state homogeneity of the United States, but maintained its relative within-country inequalities, pan-European inequality would fall by only 20 percent. Conversely, inequality in the United States would fall by 34 percent if it matched the within-country inequality of the EU-28. Our findings suggest that the strengthening of egalitarian institutions within the 28 Member States is more consequential than economic convergence in reducing pan-European income inequality. We highlight institutional challenges towards achieving a 'more equal' Europe and discuss implications for future EU policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2003, the Chinese government has been increasing its social expenditure and initiated new social welfare programmes to provide universal social protection and meet citizens' welfare needs. This article uses the wider socio-economic and socio-political contexts to critically examine whether there is a new welfare regime on the rise in China, with a particular reference to whether the increase in social expenditure has really marked a new welfare philosophy or prompted the transformation of China into a protective welfare regime. By analysing prefecture-level data for government expenditures in education, health, social security and assistance programmes between 2003 and 2012, we show a continuation of the Chinese welfare regime in 'paternalistic welfare pragmatism' for two reasons. First, government social expenditures are set on the basis of the prefecture-level government's fiscal capacity. Second, variations of welfare programmes are associated with the dichotomy between the urban formal and informal sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate on social policy change is not only about the evolving nature of social benefits but also about change in their territorial organization. This territorial issue is central in Belgium. In 2011, the Sixth State Reform featured the decentralization of family allowances, a component of social security. This article explains why such decentralization occurred in Belgium despite the fact that Francophone parties, which effectively have veto power over constitutional reform, had long insisted that no portion of social security would ever be transferred to the constituent units. We argue that increasing political pressure generated by the surge of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie (N-VA) in the context of the government formation crises altered how Francophone parties assessed both the national unity situation and their own political interests. The article also discusses the policy and political implications of the decentralization of family allowances in Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue considers education as a social policy in its own right, from a life-course perspective and in relation to other policy areas. It recognizes the complexity of education systems and their multistage architecture. The volume broadens our understanding of the role of 'education as social policy' by addressing four different aspects: the importance of education providers, education as a means of social stratification, education as an interconnected regime component and public opinion on education as an important foundation of welfare state policies and a prerequisite for their sustainability in the long run. From a theoretical perspective, all authors critically engage with the social investment state approach that sees in education and training investment the lynchpin of a pre-distribution agenda protecting individuals from the new social risks of a competitive, knowledge-driven economy. The examples provided in this Special Issue expose the multifaceted role of education as social policy, drawing attention to both its formative and stratifying function across a number of European welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy matters have long been considered women’s issues. Extant research has documented a strong link between gender and the policies of the welfare state in the legislative, executive and electoral arenas. Yet what determines the strength of this association has largely been left unexplored. Drawing on tokenism theory, this article proposes gender diversity at the group level as a key explanatory factor. It hypothesizes that the gender gap in social policy diminishes as the female representation in a political party increases. To test this argument, it examines almost 8000 press releases issued by over 600 politicians during four election campaigns in Austria between 2002 and 2013. The analysis demonstrates that women talk more about social policy issues during election campaigns than men, but that this emphasis gap disappears for parties with a more equal gender balance. These results have important implications for our understanding of the politics of gender and social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The active and healthy ageing measure reported here is calculated for the 28 European Union countries, with a specific focus on the current generation of older people and by using the latest data from multiple surveys. It covers diverse aspects of active and healthy ageing, by measuring older people’s contribution with respect to not just employment but also their unpaid familial, social and cultural contributions and their independent, healthy and secure living. The article presents the first-of-its-kind quantitative measure of active and healthy ageing in the literature on active and healthy ageing which hitherto has focused largely on concepts, definitions and public policy strategies. In this pursuit, an important contribution of this measure, referred to as the Active Ageing Index (‘AAI’), is that it also captures how countries differ with respect to capacity and enabling environments for active and healthy ageing. The AAI offers a breakdown not just by four domains of active and healthy ageing but also by gender. Key findings are that Sweden comes at the top of the country ranking, followed closely by Denmark, the United Kingdom, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland. The four southern European countries (Italy, Portugal, Spain and Malta) are middle-ranked countries. Greece and many of the Central European countries are at the bottom, highlighting much greater untapped potentials of active and healthy ageing among older people in these countries and a need for greater policy efforts. Women fare worse than men in most countries, identifying a need for an emphasis on reducing gender disparity in experiences of active and healthy ageing. The AAI tool developed has the potential to identify the social policy mechanisms behind the differential achievements of active and healthy ageing, for example, what active and healthy ageing strategies have driven top performers, and in what respect the bottom-ranked countries have lagged behind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a new perspective that draws on the theoretical insights of Fiscal Sociology, the article explores the role of fiscal imperatives for periods of welfare state expansion. By tracing the process of social insurance (SI) financing decisions in the early 1970s, a critical juncture in the development of the Israeli welfare state, the article challenges the implicit assumption in the literature that SI financing is solely aimed at covering the costs of its programmes. The findings show that SI contributions can be driven by ‘nonsocial’ motives related to the state’s broader fiscal concerns. Furthermore, and in contrast to the tendency to associate fiscal imperatives with retrenchment policies and austerity, the article shows that fiscal relations between the state and its SI system can have also positive effects on the welfare state, leading to new entitlements and increased expenditures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central instruments of social policy include not only social programmes but also how social problems and social inequality are represented in the media. In this article, these representations are analysed, with a particular focus on the meanings attached to actors, events and phenomena in the field of social policy and how they are produced and diffused through society by means of language, symbols and images. The aim of the study is to provide an analysis of the representations of social inequality and social policy in one of modern Russia’s official state-run newspapers. The various means of explaining social inequality in the official print media will also be revealed and explained here. This is achieved through a content analysis of the articles in Rossiiskaya Gazeta [Russian Newspaper] from 2005 to 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interplay between relational and structural factors in establishing the legitimacy of social governance processes at the European Union (EU) level, specifically the peer review process in the Social Open Method of Coordination (OMC). Through a multi-level governance lens, the article uses network analysis to evaluate the roles of different actors within the Social OMC governance structure and links that with the ideas of input and throughput legitimacy. The findings suggest that the peer reviews have limited capacity in improving input or throughput legitimacy. Input legitimacy has improved somewhat to include non-traditional actors, but the governance structures in place do not provide a clear role for these new actors and it remains a mostly government-driven process. While the Social OMC does open up new avenues for transparency, information sharing and improving procedural throughputs, the process does not have a clear vision in how to translate this transparency into significant increases in legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do welfare states deal with the period of the life course that is youth? In this article, we propose a two-dimension typology in order to account for cross-national variation in the access to financial independence of young people, that is, what we call ‘youth welfare citizenship’. The first dimension addresses the issue of welfare support, and distinguishes between a familialization perspective, according to which young people are seen as children, and an individualization perspective, in which they are considered as adults. The second dimension relates to the integration into the labour market, which can either provide skills for every young person in an encompassing strategy, or deliver such skills only to a specific part of the youth population in a more selective strategy. It leads to four regimes of youth welfare citizenship, which we identify in the article: the denied citizenship, the monitored citizenship, the second-class citizenship and the enabling citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies analysing welfare have previously focused on countries as units. In the course of pension cuts and the increasing importance of occupational welfare, our traditional understanding of a homogeneous welfare state is being challenged. In this article, I distinguish between both economic individual power (employee skills) and political collective power (trade unions), and their relation with different occupational pensions. A combined analysis by both factors is not common, where employee skills and power resources are traditionally treated as separate, rival explanations of public welfare. Combining the ‘method of difference’ with the ‘method of agreement’, the article first presents the within-country variety of occupational pensions in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and Denmark. Occupational pensions in the same economic sectors across countries are then used as the units of analysis in order to illustrate the plausible determinants of economic individual power and political collective power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The varieties of capitalism (VOC) literature has offered one of the most influential explanations for cross-national variation in the gender division of labour. It argues that labour markets, which privilege specific as opposed to general skills, have a negative effect on women’s employment and impede an egalitarian division of household labour. This article revisits one of the most prominent VOC studies: Iversen and Rosenbluth’s empirical analysis of the 1994 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) survey on gender relations. I argue that a gendered welfare perspective provides an alternative and more compelling explanation for the same outcomes. In my empirical analysis, I re-analyse Iversen and Rosenbluth’s study using the more recent 2002 ISSP survey on gender relations. The empirical results lend little support to the VOC approach and show that a gendered welfare state perspective, measured using a novel summary index of defamilialization, explains the observed outcomes better. The evidence in support for the VOC explanation disappears when controlling for defamilializing social policies. This suggests that a previous VOC work on the gender division of labour has suffered from omitting crucial social policy controls. This article substantiates earlier critiques of VOC that have questioned its usefulness as an explanatory framework for gender-relevant outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of the European countries experienced a turn towards activation policies during the last decades. The aim of increasing employment rates of groups formerly excluded from the labour market has required closer links with training, family or social policies with employment policy. As a result of this, we can observe modifications also in regard to policy governance, particularly emphasizing the role of the local level in implementing integrated activation policies. This article aims at testing the hypothesis of whether higher levels of stakeholder participation in the policy process lead to greater policy integration. In an explorative manner, the research hypothesis will be tested with reference to two very different cases of local activation policy. Driving factors for the differential impact of participation on policy integration will be identified through the analysis of two in-depth case studies. A qualitative process-tracing method is used in order to conduct our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2002 Barcelona summit, Germany has been seen as a regional leader in achieving European states’ shared commitment to increase state-funded childcare. Yet Germany’s childcare success has not been homogeneous across its Länder; rather, it has shown remarkable subnational variation, with considerable differences in spending, policy design and coverage. Using panel data analysis and historical narratives, this article provides a theory for variation in provision of state-financed childcare for children under three years of age. We argue that competing visions of childcare at the subnational level – driven by the demands of differing numbers of women in the workforce and religious beliefs, and channelled by local government partisanship – have served as powerful constraints on convergence. Left partisanship and increased participation of women in the labour force are associated with higher provision of childcare for those aged under three, while larger Catholic populations are correlated with less extensive state-funded childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides a detailed analysis of individual preferences towards public financial aid to students from low-income families. Who favours/opposes such aid? What are the determinants of the respective preferences? I argue that three sets of factors jointly shape these preferences: materialistic self-interests, political attitudes, and the status quo of the higher education subsidy systems by generating positive feedback-effects. Results of multilevel ordered logit models utilizing the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data for up to 22 countries over two decades indicate that self-interest matters: students strongly favour subsidies as do their parents, while those paying for the spending and those not expecting to benefit oppose such aid. Moreover, political attitudes are important: Supporters of redistribution and of increased public education spending in general, as well as leftwing voters, are much more likely to support students. On the macro-level, the findings suggest that positive feedback-effects exist: in countries with generous subsidy systems, public support for subsidies is higher. This article is the first to systematically analyse preferences towards higher education subsidies across countries and time and demonstrates how positive feedback-effects increasingly lock-in countries’ tuition-subsidy paths, making the systems resistant to (radical) change. As such, it speaks to the literature on the political economy of skill formation, the welfare state, public opinion and the public opinion–policy link. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

East-Central European countries have been hit by the economic crisis especially hard. This article argues that reactions to the crisis by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orbán have been distinct in several ways. The crisis has been used by the cabinet as a rationale to carry out paradigmatic reforms in nearly all policy fields within a very short period of time while the two-thirds parliamentary majority provided an opportunity for this. There have been no widespread protests and no veto players have prevented the implementation of reforms, partly because checks and balances, including the Constitutional Court, have been put aside. The direction of reforms has been diffuse and often contradictory, consisting of neo-liberal, étatist and neo-conservative elements. Early assessment of changes indicates the increasing polarization of society not only in terms of income but also of ethnicity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]