Search

This research compares the degree of penetration of social investment through the Autonomous State. Given that unequal implementation is observed among countries, it is worth asking if there are also significant variations at the autonomous level in the Spanish Welfare State, which is heavily influenced by decentralization. Thus, the objectives are to understand how social investment policies vary among the Autonomous Communities, as well as to establish a typology to characterize them. For this purpose, a composite index was constructed, in addition to the application of cluster analysis and principal component analysis techniques. The analyzed data correspond to administrative records of the educational and vocational training system, the employment system and the long-term care system. The results show four different typologies of Autonomous Communities, depending on the performance of training and skill development policies, and, to a lesser extent, defamiliarization policies. The main differences occur in policies where socioeconomic factors, beyond institutional ones, are more relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What impact have the two recent economic crises had on citizens’ public policy preferences? During the Great Recession government responses focused on the adoption of strict austerity measures while during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has brought economic activity to a halt, have been oriented towards an unprecedented increase in the budget to immediately address collective needs. These two contexts provide an ideal setting for research on changes in public opinion at critical junctures. In this regard, the article examines the evolution of Spaniards’ public policy preferences since the onset of the 2008 recession, focusing on the period of the pandemic. To this end, attitudes towards public spending in six essential areas are analyzed, based on survey data from 2005 to 2022. The results suggest that spending preferences change significantly in these situations, at least in the short term, and that society supports increased expenditures, although it establishes priorities among public policies. Moreover, these spending priorities are found to have shifted between the Great Recession and the health crisis. Finally, it has been found that there has been some polarization along class and ideological lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a particular policy of conditional transfer of income: Universal Assignment for Child for Social Protection (UCASP), implemented in Argentina in 2009 by the then President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, through the Decree of Need and Urgency N.º 1602/09, as a non-contributory subsystem within the Family Allowances Regime instituted by Law N.º 24,714 and under the jurisdiction of the National Social Security Administration (ANSES). The study, methodologically based on the documentary analysis, is structured around a series of axes that are essential to examine the AUHPS, among them: the regional antecedents, the context prior to its emergence, the normative juridical aspects that support it, the subjects of law, the considerations and debates of feminism and the pejorative view of the most reactionary conservative sectors that demonstrate against this type of social policy that tends to equate in rights to the sons and daughters of formal workers both with those of informal workers as with those of those who are circumstantially unemployed [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review: Rodríguez Bilella, Pablo and Tapella, Esteban. Dejar huella. Historias de evaluaciones que marcaron la diferencia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideas of the New Public Management and the emulation of European policies have extended publicprivate collaboration as a horizontal governance instrument in the provision of welfare. However, the search for greater participation of the private sector in the management of certain public services presents difficulties. A clear case is the reform of labor intermediation carried out in Spain since 2013, whose final scope has been very limited due to factors such as the crisis, the multilevel government context and the ideology of governments. This article analyzes the specific case of the Valencia Region to try to understand the difficulties of reform of this public program and contribute to the literature with new empirical evidence on the importance of the factors cited in the degree of success of the reforms that seek to increase publicprivate collaboration in the sector of social policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spain is among the West European countries that has achieved higher levels of decentralization in its Welfare State. The 1990s and 2000s witnessed an acceleration of this process, which has been accompanied by an expansion of social spending at the subnational level, especially by the Autonomous Communities (Autonomous Communities). This article aims to contribute to several debates regarding changes in the territorial dimension of governance in social policies and their explanatory factors. Specifically, it focuses on active labor market policies (ALMPs) and addresses the question of whether the reforms introduced in the field of activation in the context of the economic crisis have affected the exercise of political, financial and administrative authority by the different levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]