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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 deals with the engagement of social workers in the policy arena. It offers a conceptual framework for the examination of why social workers engage in policy practice and how they actually do so. Drawing upon examples from a cross-national study comprising eight countries, the Policy Practice Engagement (PPE) conceptual framework presented in the article comprises three legs--Opportunity, Facilitation and Motivation. It is asserted that social worker involvement in the policy arena and the form that this takes will depend upon the degree to which political institutions are accessible to social workers and the degree to which the organisational culture of theirw orkplace facilitates this type of activity. It will also be related to the degree to which social workers are motivated to engage in policy practice. This will be linked to the professional socialisation process as well as to individual characteristics and values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

We use data from nationally representative time-use surveys to compare and contrast lone and partnered mothers’ childcare time in four countries with different social norms and policy orientations towards mother-care and work–family reconciliation: Australia, the United States, France, and Denmark (N = 8,031). We decompose time with children into primary activity care tasks: (i) physical care, (ii) talk-based interactive activities, (iii) accompanying children, and also measure (iv) additional time spent with children net of specific care activities. We find that, on average, mothers in Australia and the United States spend substantially longer each day with children net of specific care activities than mothers in France and Denmark, but that primary activity care tasks are relatively uniform cross-nationally. In France and the United States, lone mothers spend less time with their children in total than partnered mothers. Gaps are widest in the United States, where, uniquely, lone mothers also do less primary activity of child care than partnered mothers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reasons why, in the first half of the twentieth century, Australian librarians were encouraged to adopt professional work practices and educational standards based on US models of 'democratic' librarianship. The promotion of US models of library education and association occurred both directly through government agencies such as the United States Office of War Information (OWI), and indirectly through the philanthropic agencies and professional associations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY) and the ALA, and was to have a lasting impact on the work of Australian librarians and on their education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although elder self-neglect is of significant concern to adult protective service (APS) workers in the United States, minimal research has been conducted on this topic in Australia. Using qualitative research methods, this article examines how 24 Australian professionals understand situations of self-neglect. Unlike in the United States, where the term self-neglect is used in a broad and all-encompassing manner, participants in this research differentiated among self-neglect (the neglect of self), squalor (extreme neglect of environment), collecting (the accumulation of certain objects), and hoarding (the inability to throw objects away). It is argued that separating out the various behaviors that are classified under the broad umbrella of neglect can be useful in fostering reflective interventions in these situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines public concerns associated with a rise in the privatization of prisons. It is stated that private prisons are generally owned by for-profit corporations that may benefit from the imprisonment of individuals, and that these corporations are also not accountable to the public as governments are. Focus is on private prisons established in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., three countries noted to share features of social policy organization, such as federalist governments and common-law systems.

In the UK, government is both concerned with improving the performance of public services, including higher education, and with ensuring that the public is aware of improvements in services, to convince the public of the effectiveness of the current regime. Success is both an effect of and a dynamic in the process of evaluating performance, and increasingly 'excellence' is established as a performance outcome. Drawing on a critical review of relevant theory and research, primarily from the UK, Australia and the USA, and illustrated by the author's experience of winning a National Teaching Fellowship, this paper examines teaching excellence in the context of two recent schemes: the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme and the Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. The performance culture in the public sector and the use of excellence as a success criterion are critically analysed. Assumptions about the transfer of excellent practice are explored. Questions about the interaction of competition and equalities issues are raised. The paper ends with arguing that if excellence schemes are to be an established feature of public sector systems, then we must develop strategies to enable them to be implemented equitably, transparently and fit for purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article elaborates the contexts of inequality in Australia and the U.S. by describing how Australian multiculturalism and U.S. civil rights discourse have deployed racial concepts to moralize the national order by acknowledging past injustices in ways that require the morally disenfranchised to re-examine themselves. The author points out ways in which national agencies employ reforms to naturalize class inequalities, as if they arise from moral deficits, deviance, or degeneracy.

Historically, insufficient resources and assistance have been provided to young people leaving state care. Care leavers have been found to experience significant health, social and educational deficits including homelessness, disproportionate involvement in juvenile crime and prostitution, poor social supports, and early parenthood. The U.S. and Australia share a roughly common political language and system and have often exchanged ideas, agendas, and policies for government. This paper finds that whilst there are some minor differences in the respective legislative frameworks and responses, the similarities are far greater. Both countries have failed to provide the range of in-care, transitional, and post-care supports and services required to ensure improved outcomes for care leavers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the welfare state of the six major Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, such as Australia, Canada, Germany, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States. It offers empirical evidence from a multicountry set of studies and discuss the methodology behind the empirical studies of the six major OECD countries. According to the author social welfare expenditures were self-financed, and could not have been a source of fiscal deficits or a drag on growth.

The article analyzes the events immediately before and after the Australian general election of November 2001 at which the Liberal-National Coalition (LNP), under Prime Minister John Howard, was returned against earlier expectations. This article consists four arguments. First, that the events leading up to that election, especially those relating to the Tampa affair in August, the terrorist attacks of 11 September, and the children overboard allegations of October, significantly distorted the established Australian campaign pattern by shifting its focus from domestic to external issues. Second, John Howard has misused the mandate principle to legitimize a raft of unpopular policy choices. Third, Howard, in succumbing to the temptation of veiling such a program behind a foreign policy campaign, has rendered the coalition, in the mid to long-term, vulnerable to a voter backlash. A fourth, and overarching, argument is that the coalition, in conducting such a campaign, deprived the Australian electorate of the opportunity to debate alternative social policy in areas ranging from the processing of asylum seekers to the delivery of health and education services.

This article examines how welfare reform works in Great Britain, Australia and the United States. In Britain the reforms that have emerged from current thinking are based on the British Labour government's espousal of a new set of ideas about social issues. The New Labour has adopted a philosophy emphasising the reciprocal obligations of citizenship, and has argued for a new contract between the state and the individual. It is claimed that past welfare policies encouraged passivity and dependency by paying benefits without placing sufficient demands on the recipients to find work. New Labour rejects the dependency and passivity that old Labour policies allowed, and it rejects the minimalist role of government towards joblessness and dependency that the Conservative governments of the 1980s adopted. Changes in welfare policies or in approaches to joblessness are likely to have direct consequences for the family. The most obvious example of this relates to lone parents, most of whom depend to a greater or lesser extent on welfare support. In Britain, Australia and the United States, the numbers of lone parents claiming welfare support have risen sharply over the last thirty years, and in all three countries it is reasonable to suppose that lone parenthood could not have expanded to the extent that it has unless governments had provided cash support.

"Evidence on labor immigration and capital inflows to three high labor-immigration economies (Australia, Canada, the United States) is examined over periods ranging from 1820-1870 through to 1991. Data show a close association between capital flows and immigration, although causality implications are ambiguous. For the United States, the relation between factor flows is more complex than for the other countries, but flows to the United States have influenced those to smaller economies. All three nations have been subjected to common immigrant push factors through to 1930-1950 but, since World War II, linkages between factor flows have altered. Post-World War II U.S. immigration restrictions have become more important as a global determinant of labor flows, with factor flow policymaking becoming increasingly internationally interdependent.", (excerpt)

"This is a short comparative overview of the present immigration policies of certain Western countries which, as regards questions of migration, are comparable. It is based on data provided by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) in Vienna.... It covers the following European countries: Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and the United Kingdom. For comparative purposes it also covers three countries overseas which are regarded as typical countries of immigration: Australia, Canada, and the U.S.A.", (excerpt)