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ABSTRACT: Caregiving can be conceptualized as involving practices of substitution, in which doctors, nurses, and health assistants step into the subject positions of their charges in order to sustain their personhood and compensate for their reduced capacities. Fieldwork in Denmark at three sites—a neonatal intensive care unit, a research laboratory using piglets as animal models, and a dementia nursing home—shows that temporality is a key component in substitution, as caregivers imagine their charges’ temporal horizons when stimulating their personhood in the ambiguous zone between life and death. Substitution practices redirect our attention from the question of what it means to be human to what it takes to, for example, turn premature infants, research piglets, and people with dementia into beings with worthy lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of political factors on population health has recently received increasing attention, relatively little is known in that respect for oral health. We aimed to assess the influence of welfare state regimes on the variation in adult oral health between European countries, building on the existing literature by using a multilevel approach. Our analysis also explored how the oral health of people with different socioeconomic position was influenced by living in five different welfare state regimes. We analysed data from the Eurobarometer survey 2009. The main outcome was no functional dentition, defined as having fewer than 20 natural teeth. Age, gender, marital status, education and occupational social class were the individual-level explanatory variables, while welfare regimes, GDP per capita and GDP annual growth were the country-level variables. Multilevel logistic regression models were fitted with individuals nested within countries. Results revealed that country-level characteristics accounted for 8.1% of the variation in oral health. Adults in all welfare regimes were more likely to have poorer oral health than their counterparts in the Scandinavian regime, with those in Eastern countries being 6.94 (95% CI: 3.62-12.67) times as likely to lack a functional dentition as adults in Scandinavian countries. The variation at country-level reduced significantly when welfare regimes were introduced into the model (from 0.57 to 0.16; 72% reduction), indicating that welfare regime explained much of the variation in the outcome among European countries. Finally, adults with less education and lower occupational level were more likely to have no functional dentition, especially in the Eastern and Bismarckian welfare regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I investigate the welfare properties of a broad class of electoral systems with endogenous turnout. I find that the welfare ranking of electoral systems depends on the composition of the electorate. If citizens have identical voting costs, then all electoral systems that satisfy certain regularity properties generate the same level of welfare. If voting costs are heterogeneous, and the two parties are (almost) equally popular, then majority rule (MR) generates the highest welfare among these systems. I also analyse a model with heterogeneous and group-specific costs. I show that, under certain conditions, proportional representation dominates MR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how caseworkers are re-constructing disability in the Danish welfare system and disciplining themselves and clients according to the active labour policy paradigm. Combining Foucault's ideas about discipline with Maynard-Moody and Musheno's method of interpreting street-level bureaucrats' stories (Foucault 1977; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003), we analyze caseworkers' stories about their clients, fellow caseworkers and themselves to understand how they practice the ideology behind active labour policy. Our analysis uses Møller's (2009) interviews with 24 Danish caseworkers who administer social welfare and sick leave benefits based on disability as the primary eligibility criterion. We selected stories told by caseworkers that exemplify archetypes of good and bad citizens, good and bad clients, and good and bad caseworkers. Through interpretative analysis, we elucidate how caseworkers make sense of active labour policy and internalize the pressures of managerial reforms to discipline both citizens and each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the potential impact of institutional change on popular welfare support. The encompassing welfare state of Sweden provides an interesting case where the privatization of social service delivery has been widespread over the last decades. We use survey data from five rounds of the Swedish Welfare State Survey (1992, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2010) in order to study how public preferences for the financing and organization of welfare services have changed over time. Based on a theory describing an ideal-typical pattern of public support for an encompassing welfare model, we derive three types of public preferences: support for a pure state model, a pure market model and a mixed model (welfare services are funded by taxes but provided by private firms). We begin by tracking the development of these ideal-typical attitude patterns between 1992 and 2010. We then investigate how preference patterns vary across municipalities displaying different degrees of privatization of social service delivery. Our results show that welfare support among Swedes over the last decades is better characterized as dynamic rather than stable. Swedes seem to take an overall more ideologically based position on the role of the welfare state over time. The share of respondents expressing such ideologically based preferences has increased from 54 per cent in 1992 to 78 per cent in 2010. This change is principally manifested in increased support for the state and mixed models. This trend seems to be parallel to the increasing share of private welfare service providers over the last decade. We also find a link between the municipal degree of privatization and support for our three ideal-typical welfare models. Public support for a mixed welfare model and, to some extent, a market model, is comparatively stronger in municipalities where welfare services to a large extent are carried out by private actors. Conversely, data shows that public support for the traditional Swedish state model is more widespread in municipalities having a low degree of welfare services privatization. Lastly, we discuss some theoretical implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most modern welfare states offer an extensive array of services and benefits that are wholly or partly financed by tax revenue. One missing link in explaining the long-run sustainability of such comprehensive welfare states could be the already-existing stock of trust. Indeed, our cross-country results suggest that trust determines the size of welfare states as well as three features that are arguably necessary for their preservation: high levels of political confidence, strong legal institutions protecting private property rights, and low levels of bureaucratic corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which discusses the impact of postsecularism on political theology and the idea of faith-based welfare, and argues that religion rather than race is the determining signifier of group identification in the 21st century. The influence of religiously-based narratives on welfare reform, particularly in the U.S. and Great Britain, is also explored.

This article discusses the signifcance and reach of concepts such as Welfare State, Welfare Regime, social protection systems, social risk management and basic universalism. It is argued that trends in social policy, beyond the influence of government programs, or purely technical factors, are related to other kinds of arrangements within society and its political processes in order to provide welfare. Specifically, political directions and trasitions are traced in Mexican society from the 1940's, when the welfare institutions were created, and the "corporatist pact" was enforced, until the neo-liberal approaches in vogue since the 1980's, when structural adjustments were introduced, and more recently the universalization of basic social services. The intention is not to focus on specific actions or in the impact of transformations, but on the implications entailed by focusing on a particular approach in the field of social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Sociologia del Lavoro is the property of FrancoAngeli srl and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Studies examining the relationship between globalisation and the welfare state tend to focus on the effects of economic dimensions of globalisation, the extent to which a country is part of the world market. Globalisation also has social and political dimensions and the effects of these on welfare states – in terms of social security transfers and generosity – are studied in this article. Data from the KOF Index of Globalisation, the OECD Historical Statistics and the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset are used to analyse the effects of social and political openness on the welfare states of 18 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development between 1970 and 2000. The analyses show that social security transfers and generosity have increased less in countries with the highest increase in social openness and that the welfare state is not affected by political openness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at contributing to a better understanding of welfare legitimacy in different institutional contexts. It examines whether or not emotions are important for welfare legitimacy by using survey findings from a representative sample of Chinese residents in Hong Kong. It follows a Dutch study of a similar nature, but finds that the Chinese exhibit a different response pattern towards the emotional motives of moral obligation and empathy and the non-emotional motives of self-interest, probably as a result of the perception of the residual nature of the Chinese welfare system. In the Chinese case, personal characteristics carry different effects compared with those found in the Dutch study. A further finding is that both emotional motives and self-interest motives are significant for hypothetical choices of welfare alternatives. But their effects are marginal, though striking in comparison with other determinant variables. In conclusion, the article argues that reciprocal self-interest is progressive, an idea that is unlikely to be honoured by many welfare state theorists such as Richard Titmuss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article has set out a conceptual framework that attempts to overcome the limits of many writings about the political economy of welfare that rest on the assumption of the self-interested citizen. For this reason, it was argued that people endorse welfare state arrangements not only because the welfare schemes maximize their income but also because they approve the moral purpose of the welfare state programs. The legitimization of the welfare state not only resides in the welfare income flows from which social groups benefit, but also in the validity of the norms of social justice. Under the premise that normative concerns as well as material self-interest have their stake in shaping attitudes towards welfare provision, it has been argued that their codetermination is influenced by the institutional architecture of the welfare state. By referring to insights provided by the institutionalist school, it was stressed that institutions embody moral conceptions. Thus, an institution that reflects people's ideas of how a society should conduct itself is likely to find public approval.

Examines the distributional effects of the Italian income maintenance system and its main defects and limitations using a tax-benefit microsimulation model and the 1998 micro data of the Bank of Italy survey of household income and wealth. Comparative perspective of the Italian welfare state; Institutional features and distributive effects of the reform of social assistance.

Evaluates the welfare-to-work programs initiated by the Conservative Party government in 1997 in Great Britain. Overview of the programs; Training and education programs; Job search measures; Incentives for employers; Assistance with job-related costs; Transitional assistance measures.

Reports on the outline of Great Britain's welfare system as of April 1998. Benefits offered by the system to disabled people; Aim of the welfare system.