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The article provides and empirically tests an analytical model that considers the relationship between the discretionary power of street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) and the institutional and organisational structures at meso and macro levels. The proposal maintains a bottom‐up perspective in the analysis of discretionary practices; at the same time, it highlights the relevance of multilevel governance systems as institutional spaces in opening and constraining the room for manoeuvre of SLBs. The analytical model is tested to comparatively analyse the implementation of the Italian guaranteed minimum income (Reddito di Cittadinanza) in two different regional welfare systems. The analysis focused on the practices and perceptions of the "navigators", a new professional group introduced to implement the same policy. The fieldwork pointed out different spaces for and forms of discretion, highlighting that different institutional arrangements affect discretion and the variability of practices; however individual and professional group factors coupled with similar external constraints nuanced this variability with the emergence of common ones. In this article, the analytical model allowed to consider in a comparative perspective how institutional factors, besides individual and professional ones, influence discretion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have revealed significant gaps in the UK public's knowledge about the welfare state and the economy. However, we know little about which groups of the population know more, and which less. Drawing on survey evidence, we confirm that many people overstimate both the size of unemployment provision and levels of benefit fraud, and also make mistakes when answering factual questions about finance, employment rights, and benefit entitlements. While men, older people and university degree holders demonstrate slightly better knowledge on average, substantial differences appear when we distinguish specific domains of knowledge. For example, women know more about benefits, but men more about finance. We argue that understanding patterns of economic knowledge requires more complex engagement than has been undertaken to date. This is important because we find that knowledge is linked to political attitudes, with those who are more supportive of the welfare state – and those who tend to emphasise the government's role in the delivery of public services – more likely to demonstrate greater levels of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universal Credit signalled a revolution in the delivery and costs of welfare provisioning. UC aimed to reduce spending on welfare, but in doing so now threatens the stability of a functioning and cohesive society. Over recent years, and most notably during the COVID‐19 pandemic, it has become ever clearer that adequate social security is vital to the functioning of society, as well as to the health and well‐being of the population. Yet this period has also served to highlight the fragility and insufficiency of welfare in the United Kingdom. This article explores how the current welfare crisis, is associated with UC. In this article, we also consider the uncertainty that UC has created in most recipients. We argue that there are other ways to support the most vulnerable in society, and that we are now at that critical juncture in needing to make significant change. Universal Basic Income (UBI) offers one such alternative by offering stable, individual, non‐means tested, and unconditional money transfers, to all citizens. Over the last decade, there have been multiple experiments around the world trialling basic income, each of which has a specific focus, or target population, as different elements of a UBI were scrutinised. In this article, we reflect upon what we consider to be the potential shortcomings of the current welfare system in the United Kingdom as a move away from its origin, arguing that the United Kingdom is now primed for UBI to be considered a fair and legitimate way to provide social security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyses policy contingencies and welfare conditionality of school allowances in Swedish upper‐secondary education. In contrast to most countries' use of positive incentives toward school attendance through added cash‐benefits for targeted students, Sweden employs sanctions on a universal study allowance that in essence constitutes an age‐extension of the universal child benefit. We analyse register data from 2012 to 2018 and find significant discrepancies in required school‐reporting when controlling for school populations and key official school‐parameters. These results indicate that negative conditioning through sanctions constitutes an often‐forfeited measure against the rather complex interplay of factors driving truancy, while enforcement of conditionality seems largely contingent upon schools' different reporting strategies and processes. We identify a set of veto points whereby school officials may opt not to enforce conditionality, and further problematize additional findings that the overwhelming majority of students with retracted allowances fail to return to school and complete their educational cycles on time. Our findings contribute to ongoing research on welfare conditionality, hitherto largely dominated by studies on labour market activation policies and social services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a growing body of work investigates the social rights of immigrants, there is a notable lack of comparative research on the topic that includes countries in the Global South. In this paper we argue that existing approaches often lack reproducibility, comparability, and adaptability beyond the cases that they focus on. To remedy this shortcoming, we propose a three‐dimensional conceptualization of immigrant social rights that takes into account differences between legal categories of migrants, between types of welfare benefits, and between types of restrictions. Applying this conceptualization, we offer the Immigrant Social Rights Dataset (ImmigSR), a set of quantitative comparative measures of de jure immigrant social rights covering 39 countries in Europe, Latin America, North America, Oceania and Southeast Asia for the years 1980–2018. Our analyses show commonalities as well as differences between world regions. Rights are more inclusive in the Global North than in the Global South. There is however a slight trend towards convergence, with rights retrenchment in the North and expansions in the South. Across all regions, temporary migrant workers and asylum seekers are the groups that are granted the least comprehensive set of rights. Depending on the dimension that is taken into focus, there are however also more nuanced intra‐regional differences. The findings confirm the usefulness of a multi‐dimensional conceptual approach to measuring immigrant social rights in a diverse set of cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study explores the experiences and attitudes of welfare recipients towards Indonesia's conditional cash transfer (CCT/PKH) program. The specific objectives of our paper include examining the program's impact on impoverished families, their response to stereotyping, and the implications of stereotyping for government policy among Indonesian low‐income families. We conducted twenty in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders (program professionals, community leaders, program facilitators) and end‐users (beneficiaries). Despite the attached stereotype, our findings show that not all beneficiaries with improved socioeconomic conditions wish to leave the program. In many cases, this occurs as beneficiaries use their CCT/PKH accounts as collateral to borrow from unregulated lenders and repay their debts. A few instances where we found self‐voluntary withdrawal from the program were only caused by the shame of receiving stickers attached to their homes – not because of their social‐economic status improvement – leading to difficulty affording their necessities afterwards. Overall, the finding that individuals, whether eligible or not, are not ashamed to claim PKH, despite the stigma attached to the program, contrasts with studies on welfare stigma, claiming that stigma can prevent individuals from claiming their welfare rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2013, the Universal Credit (UC) welfare reform has been rolling out gradually to overhaul the means‐tested social security system for working‐age people in low‐income households in the United Kingdom. Existing research suggests that UC has had a detrimental impact on the housing security of claimants, with evidence of increases in rent arrears and landlord repossession actions as the reform has been rolled out. However, there is currently a lack of evidence on the impact of UC rollout on the most extreme form of housing insecurity—homelessness. This article addresses this gap in knowledge, using Scottish local authority level data obtained from the Scottish Government on monthly rates of Housing Options approaches and statutory homelessness claims, which is linked to data on the timing of UC rollout within local authorities. The staggered nature of UC rollout (i.e., the fact that it rolled out in different local authorities at different times) is exploited in order to measure its impact within 29 Scottish local authorities using fixed effects regression modelling. The results suggest that UC 'Full Service' rollout, up to March 2019, was associated with increases in Housing Options approach rates, but there was not clear evidence of an increase in rates of working‐age statutory homelessness claims. Redesigning UC to increase its standard allowance and address its long wait periods and harsh sanctions would likely help to protect the housing security of claimants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article connects the notions of policy space and social contract in order to understand the importance of everyday discourse for the perceived legitimacy of social policy choices and emerging responsibilities in Zambia. Based on a Grounded Theory analysis of interview and document material, the article reconstructs common sense ideas about the limited resources of the state, from which modalities in the Social Cash Transfer programme, especially the requirements for targeting and graduation, are derived. It moreover explores how from these limited means also follows the sharing of responsibilities between the state and the recipients themselves, giving way to a self‐responsibility discourse. Thereby, the attempt by implementing officers and the wider community to rationalise distributional choices in light of wide‐spread poverty, shape the social contract between the state and citizens in Zambia and ultimately also delineate the space of what becomes possible to imagine within social policy. The article concludes with an argument for broadening social policy visions away from the individual level towards tackling the underlying structural causes of poverty by connecting social with economic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While social protection provision in Africa has primarily focused on the reduction of food insecurity and income poverty, it has the potential to transform the relationship between citizens and states. The articles in this special issue provide insights into the theoretical, normative, and empirical assessment of the transformative consequences of social protection programmes across parts of East, West and Southern Africa. The articles reveal that the expansion of social protection has varied effects on how governments, local officials, and citizens view their respective rights and responsibilities. Some case studies suggest the expansion of social protection has strengthened understandings of rights‐based social citizenship and the claims that citizens can make of the state. Others, however, suggest that conservative attitudes and paternalistic practices remain deeply entrenched. The result is that the transformative hopes, widespread within international organisations and donor agencies, are likely to be uneven and slow to materialise in many parts of the continent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains variation in African states' commitment to pensions? This article argues that differences in the structure of contestation and legacies of state‐labour relations matter. When competition is confined to fewer and more stable parties, social welfare appeals gain currency to mobilise swing voters and makes it more likely that pensions will become a subject of political competition. However, legacies of labour accommodation can strengthen certain elements of pension reform, but also reinforce certain policy mindsets such as contributory insurance. These ideas are developed with case studies of Ghana and Malawi. The cases utilise process‐tracing evidence to demonstrate how specific structures of contestation and labour legacies led to divergent pathways of pension reform. The article highlights the significant challenges involved in strengthening pensions in Africa, and therefore the limited potential for a reconstitution of state‐citizen relations based on pension access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social protection has grown in importance in framing the relationship between citizens and states across much of Africa. Botswana's conservative welfare regime relies heavily on local officials – many of whom are trained social workers – to exercise discretion in assessing the needs of poor people and registering them on social protection programmes. Interviews with local officials reveal that they attribute poverty and destitution primarily to the deficient attitudes and behaviour of poor people. These are in turn seen as the consequence of social protection policies that disempower people by fostering 'dependence' on state provision. Local officials prefer programmes that 'empower' poor people. Whilst they recognise that the state has responsibilities towards the poor, they implement policies that reinforce and reproduce the status of poor citizens as often undeserving claimants on public charity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is frequently assumed that social protection can play a key role in positively transforming state‐citizen relations in the global South. We examine the evidence with a focus on recipients and non‐recipients, both citizens and non‐citizens. Based on a systematic literature review, we identify three levels of analysis: activity, perceptions and expectations. A common thread through these levels is the bifurcated and hierarchical nature of relationships between social protection recipients on the one side and the state and non‐recipients on the other. Thus, the cross‐section of evidence does not conclusively support the oft‐assumed transformative potentials of social protection. Arguably, theoretical frameworks on activities, perceptions and expectations allow us to explore further the differentiated relationships shaped by social protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite clear gendered differences in rights and responsibilities, these variations within citizen‐state relations are often overlooked. Drawing on Ranjita Mohanty's concept of women–state relations and Nancy Fraser's trivalent theory of social justice, this paper asks how access to social assistance is shaped by gender. Analysing the processes of policy design and implementation of Zambia's social cash transfer scheme, the paper examines perceptions of roles and responsibilities in the private domain and claims to state assistance in the public sphere. Based on 77 key informant interviews with institutional stakeholders, and 16 focus group discussions with cash transfer (non‐)beneficiaries, the research finds a predominant belief that 'able‐bodied' men and women should be working but dramatically different expectations of women and men in the household. The paper argues that social policies can be rights‐determining rather than rights‐based, demonstrated by the changes to Zambia's targeting model based on perceived responsibilities, with material consequences for citizens and particularly women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two interrelated questions: Do social protection policies generate feedback effects on state‐citizen relations? If so, how do such policies change the perception and interaction of both citizens and the state? The paper is based on an in‐depth mixed methods study on Ghana's Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty cash transfer programme (LEAP) conducted in two implementation districts. I find emergent positive resource and interpretive/policy learning effects on state‐citizen perceptions and interactions. This is evidenced in increased state presence in service provision and changing citizen recognition of the state as a legitimate provider of their welfare, with these impacts being higher among beneficiaries with previously limited access to or negative perception about the state. Notwithstanding, these effects may be limited, unsustainable or undermined partly due to the way in which LEAP is promoted and delivered as a clientelist resource. The paper highlights the ideational and relational impact of social protection by arguing that when implemented well, social policies can generate political feedback effects beyond their poverty reduction and human development impacts by fostering policy learning opportunities for reconfiguring the perceptions of and interactions between the state and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impacts of three cash transfer programs, one for orphans and vulnerable children (CT‐OVC), one for older persons (OPCT) and a universal social pension (Inua Jamii Senior Citizens' Scheme), for citizen‐state relations in areas of Kenya that experienced high levels of electoral violence in 2007. Drawing on 40 interviews with civil servants and community leaders and 16 focus group discussions with both beneficiaries and non‐beneficiaries of the cash transfer programs conducted across two sub‐counties in Nakuru, this paper argues that the central state, in the wake of post‐electoral violence, effectively mobilised state power to make and enforce geographic targeting decisions down to the village level in an effort to mitigate ethnic tensions and strengthen citizen‐state relations. The paper further argues that the success of such localised distribution in strengthening citizen‐state relations has been limited due to incomplete program coverage, limited information about targeting procedures, and citizens' prior experiences with the state which collectively undermine citizens' perceptions of inclusion and exclusion at the local level. These findings are brought into conversation with other research on cash transfers and citizenship across Kenya to parse out the ways in which the impacts of cash transfer programs for citizen‐state relations are mediated by state infrastructural power, citizens' prior experiences with the state, and key aspects of program design. The paper also examines the implications of these findings for other countries across Africa that have experienced generalised electoral violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social and humanitarian cash transfers in sub‐Saharan Africa are increasingly used to support a wide range of vulnerable populations with long‐term support or immediate relief. Designing and implementing cash transfers typically involves a range of transnational actors and government stakeholders who continuously exert power which in turn affects state–citizen relations. The data informing this article come from 109 key informant interviews with (inter)national‐level stakeholders involved in three social cash transfers and two humanitarian cash transfers in Lesotho and Malawi. This article argues that donor‐designed targeting approaches in Lesotho and Malawi create space for new state–citizen relations, but that these are relatively shallow and reconfigured once technical capacity allows for targeting approaches that rely less on communities. It contributes to the literature on the role of transnational actors in social protection by showing that their role is significant when it comes to creating new redistributive relations, even if transnational actors are unable to convince host governments to take full fiscal responsibility for their initiatives due to differing views on who deserves what kind of support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elected politicians sit at the interface between the state and the citizens and play a critical role in shaping the social contract. This article presents rare insights into the participation of elected politicians in donor‐led social protection policy processes in Africa. Taking the case of Zambia, it uncovers the assigned and de facto roles and perceptions of Members of Parliament (MPs) in social cash transfers policy processes. The analysis reveals the agency of MPs, despite intense efforts of donors to influence and control them. Specifically, it demonstrates that donors' advocacy and learning initiatives largely failed to influence their views and values of social justice which underpin state‐society relations. Instead, MPs learned about the policy narratives of donors, enabling them to strategically employ those narratives to sustain donor relations. The article suggests that for donor‐led social protection to modify state‐society relations, MPs' active participation, full support, and deliberation are indispensable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cash transfers (CT) are increasingly used as fundamental components of countries' poverty reduction and social protection strategies. Yet not much is known about how these interventions shape beneficiaries' relations with the state and citizenship in general, and even less evidence is available on how CTs distributed by non‐state actors affect the aforementioned variables. This paper analyses how a non‐governmental universal unconditional mobile CT (a small‐scale universal basic income experiment), handed out by a foreign NGO in a rural Ugandan village, influenced citizenship. The article zooms in on effects on recipients' perceptions of the state and interactions with government representatives, where both could potentially yield repercussions on the broader social contract. The study implements matching techniques and social network analysis to explore how the transfer influenced citizenship over time. Results suggest that the CT generated a positive effect on the non‐state actor's legitimacy, without necessarily causing a lasting impact on the legitimacy of the state. Major impacts were recorded in the treatment village's 'call‐to‐action' network, highlighting patterns of change in beneficiaries' relations with local duty bearers, such as the crowding out of (multiple) local leaders by an external actor linked to the CT project. These findings confirm the possibility of inducing unintended effects in local communities through CT initiatives implemented by non‐state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social welfare programs have increasingly implemented work requirements, with punitive measures such as sanctions to enforce compliance. Frontline workers, operating in public environments with limited resources, have discretion over when to issue sanctions and often use short cuts, sometimes guided by bias, to manage caseloads. This study conducts a multi‐country systematic literature review of research related to who gets sanctioned and why with a focus on the experiences of racial, ethnic, and immigrant groups. Through our review of 23 studies, we find that there are significant disparities in sanction use and experience, and that differences are shaped by both frontline and institutional practice. While disparities were highlighted across programs, impacted groups differed based on geopolitical and historical contexts. We summarise findings across studies to provide insights into creating more equitable welfare policies and programs and offer suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK's two‐child limit restricts the child element in Universal Credit and Tax Credits to two children in a household. Given that the policy aims to influence the fertility decision making of parents in (or at risk of) poverty, it is important to explore the impact it has here. This article contrasts the policy rationale for the two‐child limit with everyday realities of fertility decision making. We share new empirical findings from qualitative longitudinal research with parents directly affected by the two‐child limit, contrasting these with the assumptions found in government speeches and statements on the policy. This exploration reveals a series of mismatches, which help explain the relative absence of fertility effects, which has been uncovered in previous quantitative analysis. We show how a government narrative of "choice" over fertility decisions is contradicted by situated realities, where choice is often absent or unresponsive to changes in financial incentives. We also find low levels of awareness of the two‐child limit, militating against it affecting fertility decision making. Our findings demonstrate the importance of better and more sustained engagement with qualitative evidence in the design and review of policies, essential if we are to prevent harms like those witnessed as a result of the two‐child limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD), the European Union (EU) acts as a 'material supporter' of national welfare states. Remarkably, the European Social Fund Plus, integrating ESF and FEAD, is presented as the main financial instrument to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights (EPSR). This raises the question of what these levers can do in terms of financial support, especially for Member States with greater social needs. By using the Social Scoreboard indicators that monitor the implementation of the EPSR, we analyse the size and distribution of ESF and FEAD according to Member States' economic capacity, social needs and efforts required to meet the European social goals. We find that the funds benefit relatively more the poorer Member States who also tend to have greater social needs. However, especially for ESF, there are significant deviations from this general pattern. Some countries consistently receive less funding than others with similar levels of social needs, and vice versa. Moreover, if, from the perspective of upward convergence, the budgets are expressed as a percentage of the efforts required to lift all income‐poor citizens to the EU‐wide at‐risk‐of‐poverty threshold, countries who need to make the greatest efforts receive less funding. These outcomes are partly driven by the funds' allocation rules, which give only little importance to the great social discrepancies between countries. This raises the question whether social needs should be taken more into account in the distribution of the funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the transformative potential of the Next Generation EU (NG‐EU) initiative in social protection taking South European (SE) countries as a test case. It starts with a brief examination of the main social parameters of the EPSR and how these intertwine with the NG‐EU strategy that links recovery from the pandemic with the EU's long‐term green and digital transition objectives. This is followed by a comparative overview of the SE countries' social, green and digital outlook when embarking upon the recovery path. In light of these, the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of the four countries are scrutinised vis‐à‐vis the NG‐EU specified priority flagship areas. The political background of the plans, the impact of the EPSR on their policy options, and their recalibration potential are comparatively analysed. In setting the course for a twin transition, all four plans share a focus on addressing long‐standing social challenges mainly by bolstering productive welfare measures. But path‐dependent differences in policy mixes and varying policy integration can weigh significantly on outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to the discussion about the role of housing in the old‐age security. It attempts to identify some patterns concerning wealth accumulation preferences among elderly households. We pose a question whether these patterns can be associated with pension generosity measured by the level of income replacement. The study employs micro‐data from the Luxembourg Wealth Study dataset. Using statistical analysis and multinomial logistic regression modelling we examine housing wealth patterns among elderly households with a special focus on the possible linkage between housing and pension system's generosity. The results of cross‐country comparisons imply that there are large country differences in terms of housing wealth accumulation. Analyses of the relationship between (average) pension system generosity and the (average) share of housing assets in total assets at the country level using aggregated values do not provide any evidence for the pensions‐housing trade‐off. However, when the level of aggregation is reduced, a different picture emerges. Especially when the households having very small or no housing assets relative to total assets are excluded, it becomes clearer that individuals receiving higher pension tend to differentiate their asset portfolio. A possible explanation for this result could be that housing equity becomes less attractive as its role of old‐age security is limited by pension generosity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activation policies have increasingly targeted new and 'hard‐to‐serve' clients with complex needs, often deprived of the labour market experience, health, skills, and competencies that employers look for. The role of the health sector as a partner for welfare services has thus become more important. Cross‐sectoral frontline delivery of activation is seen as crucial in succeeding with activation and labour market integration in general and especially for young adults with complex needs. The current study aims at contributing new insights on such cross‐sectoral coordination by investigating how various actors within the welfare and health services experience interagency collaboration in the context of activating young welfare clients in the Norwegian Work Assessment Allowance scheme (WAA). Our data consist of 33 interviews with frontline workers in the two sectors in six different municipalities. Our data suggest that cross‐sectoral work in Norway directed at young WAA‐clients is hampered by a lack of coordination and communication between frontline workers in the two sectors, leading to tension and inefficiency in activating these young clients. We do, however, find that in‐house medical advisers in the welfare services have a potential to act as boundary spanners, but that seem to be an underused asset in this regard. We conclude that frontline workers' opportunities for cross‐sectoral coordination seem to be constrained by narrow and insufficient spaces for integration and collaboration, possibly due to organisational and administrative barriers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does the public decide who is deserving of welfare benefits? To shed light on this question, we investigate whether the CARIN principles of deservingness—specifically the ideas of control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, and need—impact the public's perception of American welfare target groups. We draw contrast between traditional welfare programs and pandemic‐related programs to gain a more comparative understanding of the principles' effects as well as to determine what role the pandemic may play in shaping welfare perceptions. We report that positive, deserving social constructions exist for recipients of both traditional and pandemic‐related welfare programs, and we find evidence that the distinction between traditional and pandemic‐related programs is important for deservingness perceptions in the US. Overall, these results suggest the importance of the CARIN criteria in an American context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social welfare aims to support financially vulnerable households by protecting them from financial shocks and providing them with a basic standard of living. Many eligible households, however, do not take up social welfare. We present the results of in‐depth interviews with 31 members of financially vulnerable households in two large Dutch cities about their experiences with welfare. We examined the role of money in their lives, what inhibited them from taking up social welfare, and how they sought support. For many interviewed households, money was a source of stress. The fear of reclaims and mistrust of government institutions were the main inhibitors to participating in welfare programs. Whereas the experience of shame and stigma were substantial inhibitors for claiming local welfare benefits, they were not for participating in national welfare programs. Formal and informal help promoted welfare participation, but many participants lacked access to both. We discuss policies that could decrease the perceived uncertainty of benefits receipt and give directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spanish legislation on gender quotas in electoral candidate lists implies the effective incorporation of women into politics. This measure has created interest in the impact of this law on public service management (substantive representation), especially welfare services. This is due to the influence these services have on work‐life balance. Hence, the objective of this research is to determine the impact of women politicians on the efficiency of municipal welfare services. We estimate efficiency levels in public social service management using non‐parametric techniques over the last three local government legislatures in Spain. We then use truncated regression models to estimate the impact of women's substantive representation on these efficiency levels. The results confirm that more women in local government and female leadership in the opposition result in better levels of efficiency through reduced spending. In contrast, female leadership in the government and many women in the opposition reduce efficiency by supporting spending without increasing welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Europe is witnessing a 'double dualisation' process, whereby inequalities have increased both between labour market insiders and outsiders, and between core and peripheral countries. We test the double dualisation hypothesis in the context of the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Did the COVID crisis exacerbate income inequalities between insiders and outsiders? Did cross‐country territorial divides also increase? Did national governments' emergency measures contribute to containing or widening double dualisation? We deploy a multi‐method research design that combines original survey data on seven old EU member states with three case studies on Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Results show that, in the short term, the COVID‐19 pandemic has been a catalyst of double dualisation: outsiders bore the greatest burden, especially in southern European countries. National emergency measures largely depended on the fiscal leeway available to governments and followed pre‐existing welfare trajectories, thus worsening cross‐country inequalities, with potentially severe consequences for the European integration process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As countries transition from industrial to post‐industrial knowledge economies, education and skills are crucial. Consequently, policy‐makers around the globe have increasingly focused on social investment, that is, policies aiming to create, mobilize, or preserve skills. Yet, countries around the globe have developed social investments to different degrees and in highly different forms. Our goal is twofold: First, we introduce a new typology of social investment policies, distinguishing nine types along two dimensions: three distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified, targeted) and three functions (skill creation, preservation, mobilization). This differentiation allows fine‐grained analyses of the causes and consequences of different kinds of social investments, thus offering a perspective to study the relationship between efficiency and inclusiveness in a way that goes beyond the mere discussion how social investment policies grosso modo affect inequalities ('equalizing' versus 'Matthew Effects'). Second, we theorize on the politics of social investment. We argue that the interaction of policy legacies and socioeconomic factors is the main explanation for which functions of social investment policies are introduced, whereas their distributive profiles are crucially shaped by political coalitions. We illustrate with empirical material from democracies around the globe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research thus far has presented inconsistent findings regarding the effect of multiculturalism on the integration of immigrant youth; however, few studies have focused on making sense of these inconsistencies and further developing research in this field. In the current study, we focus on the possibility that policy arrangements for social welfare may condition the effect of multiculturalism in different directions. Specifically, we hypothesize that the policy mix of generous welfare spending and strong multiculturalism may not aid in the acculturation of immigrant youth in the host country. Cross‐national multilevel data from 28,879 immigrant youth in 29 countries were analysed. The results indicate that immigrant youth show higher school engagement in countries with stronger institutionalised multiculturalism. However, this pattern varies depending on the social welfare policies of individual countries. When strong multiculturalism is combined with generous welfarism in a country, it does not positively affect the school engagement of immigrant youth. These findings align with our speculation that multiculturalism is likely to work better in liberal economies than in generous welfare states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sanctioning welfare clients has become a fundamental practice for social policy based on behavioural conditionality. Although sanctioning practices have received attention in research focused on street‐level work, the way in which sanctioning practices are structured in an institutional context and used by caseworkers should be explored further. This study examines the implementation of the "wastage of resources" sanctioning directive in Polish social welfare offices, based on interviews with social workers and case studies conducted between 2019 and 2021. A research framework based on the street‐level work concept was used to indicate that sanctions were rarely used by social workers because of the administrative justification process, which overwhelmed them with the responsibility of proving sanction‐worthy circumstances. Catalogues of sanction‐worthy situations are developed by local‐level policy agents, social workers, welfare office managers, municipal courts and clients. However, generally, social workers adapt to the given context by disciplining clients informally and avoiding formal sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As market‐based responses to social care have grown in popularity across the world, the need for good stewardship of social care quasi‐markets is increasingly becoming a concern for governments. The market stewardship literature has focused almost exclusively on the role of government and central agencies. However, non‐government actors also play an important role in shaping quasi‐markets. We examine the market stewardship activities being conducted by non‐government actors in the Australian National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a large social care quasi‐market. Results show a wide range of non‐government actors are conducting both direct and indirect stewardship activities that are actively shaping the NDIS market. These include activities focused on both the participant side of the market such as advocacy and information provision and on the provider side such as connecting consumers with services, assisting providers with regulatory and administrative requirements and marketing for providers. We argue that for effective stewardship of the NDIS these activities need to be acknowledged and supported by central government. For this to occur we suggest development of a framework for distributed stewardship using principles of joined up government working. Such a framework could help inform stewardship actions across different personalisation quasi‐markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facing the growing domination of neoliberalism and new public management in welfare services, social work scholars and practitioners are engaged in efforts to resist it. Using Schram's concept of radical incrementalism, this article describes and analyzes the development of the Poverty‐Aware Paradigm (PAP) in Israel in light of this resistance. The PAP is a critical framework that focuses on poverty as a central axis of the analysis of power relations between service users and social workers. Since 2015, when the Israeli welfare ministry adopted the PAP as a leading model for social work practice in the social service departments, the paradigm has had a surprisingly warm reception, and its implementation has been extended to the health and justice systems as well as to additional welfare ministry units. The article discusses these developments as examples of 'radical incrementalism' that is, strategies of resisting neoliberalism by collaborating with the establishment to 'bend' the power of the state to benefit marginalized groups. The article analyzes the contribution of specific elements of the PAP‐its dialectic process of bottom‐up and top‐down development; its discursive contribution; its organizational framework; and its training model. Finally, the article discusses the radical nature of the PAP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the main factors influencing the success of welfare reforms in the context of crises. It focuses on the healthcare reform plan proposed in Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Recession, which aimed at the establishment of a universal health system but was only very partially implemented. As the plan would have required an increase in public expenditure, it may be expected that cost concerns explain the overall reform outcome in the context of an economic crisis. However, analysis of the process leading to the abandonment of a central element of the plan and the partial introduction of another component shows that, apart from financial concerns, the outcome is explained by three politico‐institutional factors: the political orientation of the parties in government; electoral (dis)incentives in pursuing different elements of the reform; and the extent of institutional change associated with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local state and third sector actors routinely provide support to help people navigate their right to social security and mediate their chequered relationship to it. COVID‐19 has not only underlined the significance of these actors in the claims‐making process, but also just how vulnerable those working within 'local ecosystems of support' are to external shocks and their own internal pressures. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with organisations providing support to benefit claimants and those financially struggling during COVID‐19, this paper examines the increasingly situated nature of the claims‐making process across four local areas in the United Kingdom. We do so to consider what bearing 'local ecosystems of support' have on income adequacy, access and universality across social security systems. Our analysis demonstrates how local state and third sector actors risk amplifying inequalities that at best disadvantage, and at worst altogether exclude, particular social groups from adequate (financial) assistance. Rather than conceiving of social security as a unitary collection of social transfers, we argue that its operation needs to be understood as much more fragmented and contingent. Practitioners exhibit considerable professional autonomy and moral agency in their discretionary practice, arbitrating between competing organisational priorities, local disinvestment, and changing community needs. Our findings offer broader lessons for understanding the contemporary governance of social security across welfare states seeking to responsibilise low‐income households through the modernisation of public services, localism, and welfare reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conceptualise and measure welfare state change across 21 high‐income countries as a continuum delineated by a double movement, that is, the combined change of compensatory and employment‐oriented policies. Our double movement framework readapts Polanyi's concept into the context of welfare state change. We analyse this double movement across four decades using Principal Component Analysis and a new indicator that compares spending in 2015 to maximum and minimum spending levels since the 1980. We contribute to the literature in three ways. First, we empirically document an overall change in spending for compensatory and employment‐oriented policies, with the latter becoming more prominent over time. This change is more pronounced in the 1990s and even more so in the 2000s, and partially reduced classic regime differences. The PCAs generate a Cartesian space where each country is positioned across time (the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s) and space (within four quadrants, i.e., 'the strong employment‐oriented space', 'the weak employment‐oriented space', 'the strong compensatory space', and 'the weak compensatory space'). Second, we develop a fivefold taxonomy of welfare state change characterised by: (1) retrenchment in Canada, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom; (2) abridged adaptation in Australia, Belgium, Finland, Norway, Spain and the United States; (3) minor expansionary adaptation in Greece, Italy, Japan, Portugal and Switzerland—where spending levels were low in the 1980; (4) adaptation with an equilibrium between the two movements in New Zealand and (5) strong expansionary adaptation in Austria, Denmark and France. Overall retrenchment and abridging adaptation prevail over expansionary adaptation—this is due to cutbacks of unemployment, family allowances and active labour market programmes not being counterbalanced by the expansion of childcare. Third, we critically interpret these changes, introducing the double movement concept into comparative social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various informal networks such as extended and immediate family, religious organizations, and NGOs assist a large segment of the neglected poor population worldwide by providing informal social protection. However, it is hard to locate a comprehensive definition of informal social protection that may help measure its aggregate benefits. Hence, it represents a considerable gap in the literature. To fill this gap, we used existing literature to define and devise a new framework to conceptualize and categorize informal social protection into three components: informal assistance, informal insurance, and informal labour market measures. By doing so, this paper makes critical contributions to the social policy literature as follows: First, the study synthesizes a sizeable body of research to provide a comprehensive definition and conceptualizes informal social protection in three components. The primary sources of the provision of three components of informal social protection are also presented. Second, this conceptualisation would help measure the concept of informal social protection and its attributes. Last, the proposed framework helps compare informal with formal social protection, which can further integrate the two forms of social protection. These contributions will respond to the repeated calls in the literature to advance the scholarship and develop meaningful questions for research on the role of informal social protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international criminology and social policy literature have long explored possible connections between social welfare and crime. However, existing studies tend towards high‐level comparisons of crime versus total aggregate welfare spend, overlooking sub‐national contextual differences between and within countries. There are also few studies that deeply explore this link in the Antipodes, including in Australia: a settler colony and (neo)liberal welfare state with a recent strong coupling of punitive social and penal policies that disproportionately impact Indigenous populations. This paper attends to these gaps by examining the welfare‐crime link in remote Indigenous Queensland (Australia). We use crime‐report data and an interrupted time series design to explore the effects of dynamic social welfare policies during 2020–2021: a period that saw a temporary shift away from a strict neoliberal welfare model (i.e., heavy conditionality, low benefit rates) to more supportive and decommodifying social welfare in response to the COVID‐19 induced economic recession. Our findings align with previous studies that suggest more supportive and decommodifying policies are associated with lower crime. We also bring greater nuance to how the crime‐welfare link is understood within the 'structural complexity of [Australian] settler colonialism' (Wolfe. Journal of Genocide Research. 2006;8:392), by illuminating how a politics of race animates social policies that can either produce or reduce criminogenic strains and, thus, socially construct crime in the image of the Indigenous 'Other'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the world an expanding array of behavioural conditions are being attached to social security payments. This paper offers empirical evidence of the various moral frames used in the welfare conditionality debate, by its supporters and detractors. We systematically analyse the debates in the Australian federal parliament in 2017 and 2018 on two bills attempting to introduce drug testing of working‐age welfare recipients, each of which resulted in stalemate. We find that proponents of welfare conditionality primarily employed consequentialist and paternalist arguments, supplemented by social justice, contractualism and communitarianism whilst opponents primarily employed consequentialist and social justice arguments. We explore how proponents and opponents anticipated and engaged with each other's preferred moral frames. By investigating the normative lenses that underpin arguments made for and against the drug‐testing proposal, we shed light on how the debate on drug testing might be moved beyond its current impasse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the mental health effects of lowering the UK's benefit cap in 2016. This policy limits the total amount a household with no‐one in full‐time employment can receive in social security. We treat the reduction in the cap as a natural policy experiment, comparing those at risk of being capped and those who were not, and examining the risk of experiencing poor mental health both before and after the cap was lowered. Drawing on data from ~900,000 individuals, we find that the prevalence of depression or anxiety among those at risk of being capped increased by 2.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval: 1.33–3.88) compared with those at a low risk of being capped. Capping social security may increase the risk of mental ill health and could have the unintended consequence of pushing out‐of‐work people even further away from the labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focusses on the provision of work–life balance practices across welfare states and industries and its effect on extraordinary turnover. Given the welfare states and the industry's differences, it is important to focus on extraordinary employee turnover defined as positive and negative deviations from the relevant means per year and by welfare state and industry. Based on a sample of 199 listed companies in these European welfare states from 2002 to 2011, the results showed that the provision of daycare services is higher in socially oriented welfare states (e.g., Sweden, Germany) or in low‐technology industries (consumer services) than in liberally oriented welfare states (e.g., Italy, the United Kingdom) or in high‐technology industries (e.g., IT). For the provision of daycare services, the findings support a decreasing effect on extraordinary employee turnover, whereas other practices such as flexible working, generous vacations and additional maternity leave have no effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual funding schemes are increasingly implemented to organize public welfare services and can be considered as a prime example of the marketization of social care. Clients receive a budget and can "shop" on the welfare market. Current knowledge about the impact of individual funding schemes on choice opportunities for people with an intellectual disability is inconclusive. We conducted a vignette experiment in the context of the Flemish (Belgian) individual funding scheme for people with a disability, using 610 close relatives of people with an intellectual disability as subjects. The respondents were presented with hypothetical situations in which they had to express their intention to change current care provision into care via personal assistance. We find that dissatisfaction with services and having a supportive network increases the intention to change care. Professional support from the incumbent provider does not have a significant impact. We conclude that the promise of choice, as assumed with marketized public services, is likely to be fulfilled only under particular conditions. This entails risks in terms of equal opportunities for clients receiving public services in the context of welfare markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European welfare reforms often involve the decentralization of social care services. This potentially creates central‐local tensions for professionals implementing and delivering policies on the ground. Using the capability approach (CA) as a conceptual frame, this article compares local professionals' experiences in the decentralization of social work and care services in an urban and a rural mid‐sized municipality in the Netherlands. It offers a missing insiders' perspective on central‐local tensions, focusing on front‐line workers' capabilities to effectively implement policy on the ground. It finds that perfect policy implementation is hardly achievable locally and that policies are translated through implementation and on‐the‐ground delivery. This leads to central‐local tensions and the absence of reflective space for professionals to deal with normative dilemmas. We conclude that the CA is both useful for identifying these tensions as well as providing a normative framework to guide professionals in reflecting on and negotiating street‐level issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decades saw the expansion of the geography of comparative welfare state research beyond the three worlds embracing a heterogeneous set of mainly middle‐income countries. In response, two leading state‐of‐the‐art tools for measuring welfare states through social rights, Social Citizenship Indicators Program (SCIP) and Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset (CWED), integrated many new countries into their datasets. Comparative welfare state research has yet to address the extent to which these measurement tools originally developed for measuring classic welfare states work equally well for measuring welfare states beyond the three worlds. In this article, we explore a number of challenges these datasets face in measuring these new cases. These challenges, we believe, stem from a set of key institutional characteristics widely prevalent in these welfare states. These characteristics are overt and hidden conditionalities, unconventional instruments, informal practices, nature of changes in statutory pension age and labour market characteristics of the representative worker. We propose a set of solutions to refine these datasets for comparing all cases, old and new. We conclude by drawing lessons for comparative research focusing not only on welfare states beyond the three worlds but also on the three worlds themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare reforms introduced at national level and implying changes in service provision are often managed by local authorities, and this fact paves the way for strong local‐central tensions. One of the sources of such tensions is the spread of local discretion in the implementation of central programs. In current literature, local discretion has been considered as a way not only to preserve local autonomy but also to capture central resources or to shift cost burdens upwards. This opportunistic behaviour is especially spread in countries characterized by weak vertical coordination in their multi‐level governance system. This paper investigates the dynamics of local discretion as a specific phenomenon relating to central‐local tensions by observing the implementation of an innovative national long‐term care program (Home Care Premium), in a national context (Italy) characterized by a high degree of institutional fragmentation. The findings show that, in spite of the programme's centralistic orientation and generous funding, specific discretionary practices have been extensively adopted by local authorities to develop strategies aimed at shifting the costs of local service provision towards central funding. Using a specific measure of local discretion, we examine first the territorial distribution of discretion over the country. Then, a regression model is developed to explain to what extent local discretion is explained by demand‐side, supply‐side or policy legacy factors. Results show the relevance of territorial socio‐economic inequalities in explaining local discretion and related cost‐shifting behaviours by local authorities located in poorest, highly deprived areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public subsidization of food is an important element of North African welfare states, guaranteeing access to affordable nutrition and maintaining food security even in times of economic downturns. Since the 1970s, universal food subsidy schemes have come under growing international pressure, and North African countries have selectively adopted policy recommendations and adjusted their subsidy schemes. Comparing the empirical cases of Egypt and Tunisia before and after the 2010/11 uprisings, we analyze the linkages between international organizations, national governments and local welfare demands and explain what kinds of reform alliances emerge between these actors. We find that until 2010, internationalized social policy reform was structured by governments' brokerage of international and domestic pressure and adaptation of reform aims. Since then, two modes have unfolded: in militarized Egypt, coercive closure secured an alliance and the respective subsidy reforms, whereas in Tunisia, polarization disconnected domestic and international policy goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the goals and activities of civil society organisations (CSOs) that are active in the field of immigrant welfare rights differ between autocracies and democracies? In this paper, we argue that a mechanism of CSO engagement plays out differently in these two political contexts because organisations adapt their goals and activities to the political regime they operate in. In the empirical analyses, we compare democratic Argentina and electoral‐authoritarian Malaysia using data from CSOs' public mission statements as well as from interviews with CSO members from both countries. We find that in Argentina, more universalistic constitutional provisions and commitments to international treaties allowed CSOs to reference norms of equal treatment, arguing for immigrant access to a variety of programmes, including non‐contributory social assistance benefits. In Malaysia, CSOs relied on moral frames of equality to a lesser extent. Instead, they advocated for inclusion in contributory schemes on the basis of deservingness of migrants given their contributions to society, focusing on minimum standards to guarantee that basic needs are met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment had risen to historically high levels in Britain before the coronavirus crisis; however, whereas work is traditionally conceptualized as a route out of poverty, this is no longer necessarily the case. Participation in non‐standard or low‐income work such as zero‐hour contracts, involuntary part‐time work and self‐employment is increasingly a feature of the labour market and in‐work benefits which top‐up low incomes have been pared back. This case study undertaken in the period before the coronavirus crisis takes a multi‐disciplinary approach in relation to three key questions: are working women resorting to food bank use in times of financial hardship?; to what extent is this a function of non‐standard working practices?; and is welfare reform a contributing factor? A three‐strand approach is taken: a synthesis of literature, an analysis of national data and in‐depth interviews with stakeholders involved with referrals to or delivery of emergency food provision within northern Britain. The findings highlight a growth in precarious employment models since the 2008/2009 recession and how this intersects with increasing conditionality in welfare policy. We contribute to the debate by arguing that ideological driven policy fails to acknowledge structural deficiencies in labour market demand and misattributes responsibility for managing precarious working patterns onto individuals who are already struggling to get by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In line with the previous research, we confirm that welfare programmes in Hungary are poorly targeted in terms of socio‐economic status (SES). However, by adding age to our models, we demonstrate that even if the status is irrelevant in explaining access to social benefits and services, age is not. Applying simple regression techniques, we compare both the theoretical importance (based on regression coefficients) and the dispersion importance (using Shapley‐value decomposition of the R2) of age and SES in explaining the receipt of and contributions to both in‐kind and in‐cash benefits at the level of the general government in Hungary. We conclude that what appears to be a dysfunctional instrument in alleviating poverty and inequality in a univariate model is actually a channel of resource reallocation that connects working‐age people to children and to the elderly when the model includes two predictors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]