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Since the global financial crisis in 2008, an ‘austerity consensus’ has emerged across many advanced capitalist economies (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012). Despite differing institutional settings, there has been a notable degree of convergence on fiscal consolidation (Farnsworth and Irving, 2012; Taylor-Gooby, 2012). Alongside this, political administrations have repeatedly claimed that welfare profligacy and dependency are key causes of public sector debt and economic stagnation. On this basis, political leaders have cultivated a policy mandate to re-configure working-age welfare and constrain public social expenditure in this domain. Taken together, these reforms represent a ‘new, more constrained and qualitatively different deal for citizens’ (Dwyer and Wright, 2014: 33). The central objective of this themed section is to explore the impact of these developments and their significance for the shifting character and operation of social citizenship in countries pursuing a similar strategy of ‘welfare austerity’ (MacLeavy, 2011: 360). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A growing body of research quantifies the recent impact of fiscal consolidation and public service reform in liberal welfare regimes. However, less is known about how this is affecting the common terms upon which citizenship status is granted and experienced. With this in mind, this article examines what bearing the political crafting of welfare austerity is having on the status, rights and identity of notionally equal citizens. To do so, this article draws on a qualitative study examining lived experiences of poor and rich citizenship in New Zealand and the UK. Despite policy programmes idiosyncratic to their institutional context, both countries exhibit a similarly bifurcated system of social citizenship that is serving to structure, rather than moderate, material and status inequalities in austere welfare regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Viewed within their historical context, recent cuts to public social spending and increasingly governmental welfare reforms reflect and beget a shift in the praxis of social citizenship in the UK. This review article demonstrates how greater conceptual attention to the constitutive features of social citizenship can help clarify some of the claims made about its relation to austerity and welfare reform within the existing literature. Through schematic consideration of the emerging evidence, this article suggests that welfare austerity is undermining the ‘effectiveness’, ‘inalienability’ and ‘universality’ of social citizenship in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]