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In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the expansion of Social Healthcare Insurance coverage and public health service provision in China were compromised by regional policy fragmentation and correlated discrimination against the domestic migrant population, who moved across geographic areas. Nevertheless, how has the Chinese healthcare reform developed a new trend over the last decade, which has emphasised expanding effective Social Health Insurance coverage and equalised basic public health services to migrants, thus taking a crucial step towards Universal Healthcare Coverage? This trend is buttressed by a more unified and coordinated system that is amiable to benefit portability and wider healthcare access. Nevertheless, the received wisdom does not provide an effective explanation for such a trend. The literature shows that due to the hefty amount of autonomy enjoyed by local leaders who seek revenue-based or promotional opportunities through intense competitions with counterparts in other regions, localism is likely to persist. These local leaders have gained power from national leaders through top-down political delegation. While such a "principal-agent" framework facilitates the understanding of the complex policymaking and implementational processes within China's multi-level governance structure, it does not show how the country overcomes some substantial institutional barriers and makes progress towards Universal Healthcare Coverage, albeit having not achieved full universalism. This thesis offers an explanation by bringing technocrats back in. I developed a nuanced "principal-agent" model, which considers the autonomy and policy impact of the technocratic community. This thesis argues that technocratic interests and actions generate an important counterbalancing impact on the policymaking tendency to fragmentation and localism, which is inherent in the incentive mechanism concerning leaders. Ministerial technocrats utilise the "promotion tournament 2.0" mechanism as an institutional guarantee to rein in local officials, while also mobilising subordinates on the basis of esprit de corps. With a collection of empirical papers, this thesis takes a mixed-methods approach to address academic debates situated at the intersection of Chinese politics, public administration and social policy disciplines.

The policy making approaches, social policy agendas and instruments deployed by large, Western philanthropic donors - referred to as big philanthropies in this study - have tangible consequences for the institutions, mechanisms and processes of social policy formation and social policy delivery across the Global South. Over the past decade, big philanthropies have also become increasingly integrated and influential actors in the processes and structures of global social governance. Given their significance in shaping global social policy trends as well as aid architecture and welfare outcomes in the Global South, this research seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the social policy approaches deployed and promoted by contemporary philanthropic donors, as well as the theoretical frameworks that explain them. This doctoral thesis examines these issues through a qualitative case study of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's work in the health sector in Tanzania. Two primary research interests guide the analysis: (i) understanding whether the ideologies, policy goals and instruments promoted by big philanthropies represent a coherent and distinctive global social policy paradigm; and, (ii) identifying the sources of authority and strategies deployed by the Gates Foundation to instigate transnational social policy transfer. The research also explores the perspectives of a wide range of stakeholders on the comparative advantages and potential risks of social policy delivery by big philanthropies in a development context. Crucially, in addition to interviews with representatives of the Gates Foundation itself, the study examines the views and experiences of the government and civil society actors on the ground in Tanzania. The analysis is primarily guided by: Peter Hall's theory of policy paradigms; policy transfer analytical frameworks; and Global Social Policy theory. The findings of the thesis suggest that big philanthropies are significant policy actors and operate within a coherent social policy model. Underpinned by the view that poor populations lack the necessary assets to fully realise their economic capacity, the model constitutes an instrumental 'social investment' approach. It is primarily focused on strengthening individual capacity in order to spur employment, productivity and economic growth, in contrast to approaches that pursue social justice or social equality through universal welfare systems. It is also differentiated from other paradigms by its emphasis on private sector methods and targeted vertical interventions (focusing on specific diseases or targets as opposed to broader system-wide objectives) that prioritise innovation, use of data and technology. The overall method is analogous to Third Way models - driven by short-term pragmatism rather than dogma, and promoting social policy approaches that integrate private, public and third sector actors. The analysis also shows that big philanthropies have unique forms of normative and epistemic authority, derived from the legitimacy of altruism, celebrity status, up-to-date scientific knowledge and private sector expertise. Combined with extensive access to different cross-sectoral networks, these characteristics enhance their policy influence as global policy entrepreneurs. The evidence also demonstrates that the Gates Foundation's policy transfer strategies combine high visibility policy promotion, covert influence notably through local policy intermediaries, and subtle financial pressure through 'soft conditionalities'. Local stakeholder perspectives pointed to several risks and caveats associated with the involvement of big philanthropies, and the Gates Foundation specifically. These included the omission of national policy plans and priorities, exacerbation of fragmentation of development efforts, and friction with the domestic policy environment - potentially leading to inappropriate policy transfer. This thesis underscores the fact that external actors - including Western big philanthropies - continue to influence social policy directions in the Global South and that this renders their involvement problematic. The study also demonstrates the robustness of policy transfer frameworks in explaining this phenomenon and shows that social policy ideas and approaches travel transnationally both through epistemic-hegemonic influences and hard mechanisms drawing on financial pressure.

There were 218 million one-child families in China in 2013 because of the one-child policy (OCP). The OCP has disrupted demographic patterns and created numerous issues for Chinese society. One lesser known problem relates to families in which the only child prematurely dies before the parents. These are known as shi du families, of which there were one million in 2010 and more are being created continuously. The problems arise because the only child is both the only recipient of their parents’ investment and the one who shoulders the responsibility for supporting the whole family and their parents in old age. The government has introduced some support policies for shi du families. But most offer financial assistance or compensation and are far from satisfactory because they lack understanding of the specific situation of shi du families under the influence of specific aspects of Chinese culture. This thesis therefore sets out to explore the research question of What impact does death of the only child have on the everyday life of shi du parents? The current research evidence shows there are discrepancies in explaining the grief experiences of shi du parents. Also that there is little understanding of how their social relationships have been affected or how shi du parents make sense of their loss and their life. These are important considerations because culturally the death of a child is regarded as being inauspicious in China and families face potential stigmatization. This thesis adopted a qualitative methodology to fill these knowledge gaps. In-depth interviews were conducted with 35 shi du parents who had no grandchildren and who lived in Henan province. Overall, the evidence from the data shows that these shi du parents go through a dynamic grief process, the consequence of which is that they believe their grief will never really pass and they cannot recover. The death of their child changed their social relationships because the parents felt stigmatized as a result of cultural beliefs in inauspicious deaths. Consequently, they could not keep some of their social relationships functioning and in reciprocal balance the way they did before and their grief reactions and behaviors were often misunderstood by others (including family members) resulting in them experiencing a disenfranchised grief. The parents also felt that their personalities were affected and their views and understanding of their lives had changed, leaving them with feelings of hopelessness and no meaningful future life.

This thesis explores how interventions based on changing social norms can transform the behaviour of people and contribute to tackle social and policy challenges in real-world contexts. Specifically, it focuses on how a policy experience that had important and enduring effects in a large city (the civic culture interventions of Antanas Mockus in Bogotá, Colombia), could inform the application of more effective and sustainable interventions than those that are typically applied in the academic literature. To do this, three studies were conducted to explore (i) the intervention strategies and mechanisms that social norm interventions apply to achieve behavioural change (through a systematic review of over 90 field studies), (ii) the narratives through which different policy actors interpret and disseminate intervention messages (through narratives from citizens, the press and designers about Mockus’ most iconic intervention), and (iii) the way in which interventions that leverage social norms can reconfigure the physical, psychological and social layers of local installations (through two long-term experimental interventions to change driving behaviours among truck drivers). While typical social norm interventions in the academic literature tend to use easy-to-implement one-size-fits-all mechanisms (based mostly on giving group summary information to students remotely), our results illustrate the need and the potential of applying social norm interventions that: - Use strategically a wider range of intervention mechanisms that are closer to where behaviour actually happens and leverage social interactions - Reconfigure the local physical, psychological, and social determinants of behaviour in a way that is tailored to the target contexts and behaviours, creating collective selfreflections on participants and giving them tools for social regulation and change - Create engaging narratives around the behaviours and social expectations that must change, reframing social challenges and the agency of different actors around them Our findings offer indications of a valuable and cost-effective approach to behavioural and social norm change that promotes collective reflection, engagement and action (rather than boring instructions, prohibitions, punishments or automatic nudging), and that thus has a higher potential of achieving enduring large-scale transformations in complex challenges than other approaches that are common in policy and organizational settings. By offering insights into the orientation and practical techniques of these interventions, as well as discussing implications for both researchers and practitioners, we hope to inform more effective and sustainable interventions to tackle social challenges in the real world.

This thesis examines the significance of ideas of social rights in shaping social assistance policies for the unemployed and lone parents in Britain and Ireland over the period 1985-2015. Adopting a qualitative, comparative case study approach and based on a combination of elite interviews and primary and secondary data analysis, the study finds that different ideas about social rights account for substantive and otherwise unexplained social assistance policy variation across Britain and Ireland. A blended human rights-positive rights idea was consistently relevant to Irish social policy-making while varying ideas of positive rights and social citizenship rights were associated respectively with periods of Conservative and Labour Party governance in Britain. The thesis shows that cultural legacies and political ideologies were significant in determining the ideas of rights that became salient in each country context, suggesting important three-way interactions between ideas, interests and institutions and lending support to theoretical arguments about the ‘mutual constitution’ both of ideas and interests, and of interests and institutions.

Public polarization about the issue of immigration is a significant source of deepening divisions in society. To better understand public attitudes to immigrants' inclusion in the welfare state, this research takes a novel, qualitative approach to studying public attitudes through social interaction during democratic forums conducted in Norway and in the United Kingdom in 2015. The research analyses people's understanding of the issue of immigration and how they articulate their attitudes and interact with others. It finds that attitudes to immigrants' inclusion involve diverse considerations and create ambivalence, as people have both positive and negative perceptions of immigration and immigrants. Furthermore, as people differentiate between immigrants, preferences for inclusion and exclusion vary depending on the group of immigrants. Changes in attitude can be identified considering the specific social contexts, needs, and interests related to the in-group, to the welfare state in the country of destination, and to the social situations that immigrants face. Therefore, this research stresses the dynamism of attitude-formation and argues that public attitudes to immigrants should not be simplified to one single attitude either 'for' or 'against' the inclusion of immigrants, as preferences range between pro-inclusive and pro-exclusive depending on the specific group of immigrants and the specific social context under consideration. Furthermore, this research provides new evidence about how specific institutional features are discursively reproduced through interaction during debates. The research argues that especially differences in the institutional and social context explain the differences between the inclusive approach to immigration in the Norwegian and the restrictive approach to immigration in the British democratic forums. These findings draw attention to the power of the framing of issues in the wider public- and political discourse, and to the role of the homogeneity and heterogeneity of views. While a homogeneity of views and prevailing consensus within group discussions (and within the wider social context) can limit the scope of attitude-formation and restrict the reconsideration of stances for or against inclusion, a heterogeneity of views and competing preferences engender more comprehensive discussion that includes consideration of a wider range of aspects and measures concerning the inclusion of immigrants. In analysing the dynamism of attitude-formation and the diversity of considerations behind public attitudes, the research makes significant theoretical and methodological contributions to the knowledge in the field of welfare attitudes. The research findings complement existing research into attitudes to immigrants' access to welfare provision, which predominantly relies on public opinion surveys. Furthermore, the research has important implications for future research and policy-making.

Since the turn of the century, tax and cash benefit policies for households undertaking paid work, referred to as ‘in-work benefits’ in this thesis, have become common among democratic capitalist countries, including European countries. These policies are often associated with the goals of alleviating in-work poverty and reducing unemployment as they ‘make work pay’ by topping up inadequate earnings for some working households. The rise of in-work benefits therefore signifies at least a partial break with the ideal that participation in paid work guarantees financial independence from the state, which has been historically embedded in varied institutional configurations across capitalist countries. Yet, gaps in comparative research on trends and variation in in-work benefits make it hard to assess the significance of this shift. Claims about in-work benefits as being driven by socio-economic pressures (e.g. labour market risks in deindustrialised societies), political compromise and ambiguity, and the (neo)liberalisation of political economy, may not apply across contexts, especially given the variation in in-work policies identified in some studies. Addressing these gaps, this thesis develops a conceptual framework, which draws on comparative political economy and social policy perspectives to interpret cross-national and temporal variation in in-work benefits, considering the socio-political dimensions of policies under examined in comparative research. Specifically, it compares the orientation of countries’ in-work policies to forms and degrees of dependence on the state, labour market and the family. Using data on countries’ tax-benefit systems, and estimating countries’ expenditure on in-work benefits using a tax-benefit simulator, this framework is applied to a systematic comparison of in-work benefits in European Union member states (EUMS), covering the period 2006 and 2017. It includes a mapping of two ‘archetypal’ in-work benefits and two forms of ‘possible’ in-work benefits; analysis of policy expenditure from 2006 to 2017; and a comparison of policy rules and design features, operationalising the ‘dependency relationships’ framework. In line with the systemic frameworks underpinning the research, the findings are contextualised with indicators of historical and contemporary context, including social policy legacies and socio-economic pressures, across EUMS. This thesis provides further evidence that tax and benefit policies that bring the state more firmly into the domain of income maintenance for working people are common across EUMS. Such policies were implemented and/or expanded more recently in Nordic, Central and Eastern and Southern European countries. Yet, both the variation identified in EUMS’ in-work policies in this research, which are summarised into five ideal-typical models, and the different ways in-work benefits appear to relate to institutional and socioeconomic context, indicate that the ideals and interests underpinning in-work policies cannot be understood in homogenous terms. The findings also cast doubt on the notion that in-work benefits will become increasingly prevalent in the future. The thesis leads to several recommendations for future research, including analysis of specific cases, selected from the five models identified, to further examine the interaction of historical institutions, socioeconomic factors and political dynamics on in-work benefit policymaking.

This thesis analyses a particular social policy episode: that of the turn to tax credits (instead of benefits) to support low-income groups in France and Britain in the 2000s. It asks about the rationale that led left-wing governments in both countries to deviate from institutional traditions in matters of income-support, and to instead use policy instruments pertaining to a seldom-studied domain of social policy: fiscal welfare, or tax provisions serving a social policy purpose. Drawing on original archival sources and interviews with policymakers, the thesis reconstructs the genesis of the change of instrument in both contexts. It advances a novel explanation for the turn to fiscal welfare for income-support purposes: namely, that it was driven by left-wing governments' adoption, at that time, of a logic of negative welfare expansion. While welfare expansion is often synonymous with spending increases, negative expansion entails decreasing taxes instead. It involves taking less from low-income individuals instead of giving more to them. In both countries, policymakers saw negative expansion through fiscal welfare as functionally equivalent to positive expansion through benefit increases, which allowed bypassing constraints on traditional income-support. Tax cuts were economically respectable instruments, at a time when concerns with economic credibility led politicians to avoid spending increases. Tax credits could also be used as a means of unifying different constituencies, at a time when governments aimed to assemble cross-class coalitions centred around middle-class voters. As well as building a novel argument about the origins of the policies, this thesis also puts forward and investigates the notion that this turn had unanticipated political consequences. In particular, it argues that taking less is not the same as giving more when it comes to the formation of policy preferences and attitudes to redistribution. Using a mix of regression analyses and quasi-experimental designs, this thesis shows that the change of instrument failed to alter attitudes to redistribution towards low-income groups in the UK. Further, despite their generosity the British tax credits failed to generate lasting support among beneficiaries of the policy themselves. These findings suggest that the turn to tax credits led to an erosion of the overall support for policies benefiting low-income groups. Over time, policies implementing a negative expansion risk shifting the balance of preferences away from income-support. This thesis also sheds light on the understudied phenomenon of fiscal welfare for low-income groups. Using microsimulation, it produces original estimates of the budgetary incidence and actual redistributive effect of fiscal welfare for low-income groups in six countries. The budgetary costs involved are in the same order of magnitude as amounts spent on family benefits. Looking at the redistributive incidence of these schemes reveals an important pattern: often times, schemes ostensibly designed to benefit low-income groups actually have a regressive impact.

As formerly centralised social infrastructure services are outsourced, organisations with highly disparate cultures and working practices are increasingly required to collaborate to deliver essential community-facing services. Sustaining such multi-sectoral and cross-cultural collaborations over time requires an ongoing synthesis of myriad values, norms and hierarchies, thus increasing the potential for conflict as well as relying heavily on interpersonal relationships. This exploratory research study aimed to better understand how conflicting views arrived in ‘the spaces between’ individuals and organisations working in collaboration and to explore how differences were negotiated. The small-scale mixed methods research design used a complexity-informed framing to surface differing viewpoints and needs in four task groups. Participants (n=21) were drawn from two cross-sector collaborative systems which delivered community-facing work in the UK and the Netherlands. Each group completed an identical 2-hour interactive, self-managed session consisting of four separate tasks: initial reflections on why they took part in the research; co-creating a map of the collaborative system surrounding a specific piece of work; exploring values that underpinned the work; and final reflections. Data collected included recordings of all participant interactions; participant-created maps of two multi-level collaborative systems; observation and reflection data; feedback data from participants; and entries from the PhD journal. An iterative, emergent approach to the data analysis resulted in the development of an innovative methodology for visualizing qualitative group data. Building on previous studies of small group mood, these visualizations highlighted shifts of energy in the group interactions and explored how these shifts related to laughter use in the groups. Textual analysis of the data built on the visualizations to explore micro-power dynamics and strategies used by participants to negotiate fields of tension during their discussions. The combined visual and textual data analysis surfaced a number of findings in relation to collaborative work, from the impact of nonverbal interaction on positive group function to the significance of insider/outsider positioning and the ranking of knowledge hierarchies. Theoretical and applied outputs from the transdisciplinary research include reflections on the active engagement with an emergent frame in qualitative research; a conceptual focus on ‘the space between’ to illuminate group dynamics and interactions; the trial of innovative research methodologies, from the visualization of qualitative data to psychodynamic observation of undercurrents in group interaction; a heightened awareness of the importance of nonverbal communication in group interaction; and negotiation strategies employed by participants as they worked together. These outputs hold relevance for the social science research community; for those working in or with collaborations across a range of settings; and for both research and practice in relation to the sustainability of multi-sectoral and cross-cultural working environments and programmes.

This thesis is situated in the core idea of policy evaluation that evidence should be used to identify the impact of an intervention and inform future social policies. The aim of this thesis has been to re-purpose evaluation through a deliberate engagement with normative foundations. This thesis is based on a critique of what scholars such as Carol Weiss have identified as establishment forms of evaluation. Establishment evaluation can privilege technocratic forms of knowledge and uncritically follows the original framings of policy. Establishment evaluation is problematised as it tends to produce knowledge with a limited scope for policy-learning about social transformation. The thesis uses an abductive approach to re-purpose evaluation through empirical investigation into more open and contextualised forms of research. The empirical investigation involved four action research projects: a photovoice project about everyday life; an evaluation of a project designed to tackle food poverty; an evaluation of a project focused on supporting low income families; and a collaboration to adapt the evaluation approach of the charity Save the Children. The research questions for this thesis are: (1) in what ways can more open forms of research inform an evaluation? (2) What types of contextualised research are most relevant for an evaluation? (3) How can narratives of impact produce causal explanations through an evaluation? The findings suggest that a more open and contextualised approach to research can develop a broader investigative scope for evaluation, beyond the original framing of a policy. Three foundations for a new form of counter-establishment evaluation have been developed: firstly, a cooperative approach is proposed to co-construct situated causal explanations through an evaluation with participants; secondly, a new regulative ideal of participatory parity has been constructed to enable a normative assessment of how an intervention has delivered social justice; and finally, an original concept of everyday radicalism has been created to produce knowledge that can disrupt dominant discourses of political economy and existing frames of social policy. The thesis develops an approach for a more publicly engaged normative political sociology that can contribute knowledge to support social change.

East-Asia-specific institutional characteristics, especially family-related and cultural contexts, raise a question regarding the ‘political terrain’ in the region – whether a certain section of the population is clearly supportive of a particular social policy, while others are not. East Asian societies including Korea are characterised by the Confucian culture and experiences with developmental welfare states, both of which emphasise the role of family in welfare provision. From the perspectives of new institutionalism, such contexts may create distinctive reasoning patterns in relation to social policy preferences. In this regard, this thesis investigates social policy preference formation of individuals in Korea, with a particular research question of how policy preferences of a particular social group - female labour market outsiders - are shaped by family-related and cultural contexts. This study employs a mixed-methods approach that collects and analyses data using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative analysis tests the validity of existing theories on welfare attitudes, using individual-level data of ‘2013 Public Attitudes towards Welfare Policy Survey’. In the light of quantitative analysis, the subsequent qualitative analysis interrogates about how social policy preferences of female labour market outsiders are affected by family-related and cultural contexts. Specifically, semi-structured interviews with 27 female labour market outsiders were carried out from June to December 2016, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The overall argument of the thesis is that in Korea, family welfare and prevailing ideas of a desirable society play a significant role in shaping social policy preferences of individuals, particularly female labour market outsiders. Family welfare is found to motivate research participants to share reinterpreted problem recognition within the family, which eventually encourages them to assess social policy for the sake of maximum utility for the family, not for themselves. Prevailing ideas of a desirable society, notably selective compassion for the deserving poor and pro-developmental view, appear to increase individuals’ preferences for the selective provision of social welfare. These findings can be understood as suggesting that in Korea, social policy preferences of women in the labour market outsider position could be different from what is expected by the individualist self-interest-based assumptions. Also, it is likely that social cleavages between female labour market outsiders and other socioeconomic groups on the issues of redistribution are less likely to be generated in Korea, relative to countries with individualist culture. The thesis makes three original contributions to knowledge. Firstly, this thesis extends the regional coverage of welfare attitude study beyond Western countries by shifting scholarly attention to Korea. Secondly, the thesis theorises social policy preference formation in Korea through new institutionalism that mediates the relationship between institutions and individuals’ self-interest and value-orientation. Lastly, the thesis moves beyond a quantitative analysis by employing a mixed-methods approach.

Within the increasingly global agora of social policy-making, social protection has been constructed as a global policy idea by a broad epistemic community of transnational agencies, including the World Bank, ILO and DFID. Competing framings of social protection have influenced the models that have been introduced by these transnational agencies at country level. Cash transfers have gained particular attention, and been actively promoted to governments across sub-Saharan Africa. From its origins as a nation created by colonial borders to the interventions of international financing institutions through structural adjustment and subsequent debt relief, Zambia has long been shaped by external influences and forms of policy transfer. As with many countries in the region, the cash transfer model was introduced in Zambia by donors in the early 2000s, but initially resisted by the political stream. However, in 2013 the Zambian government increased their investment in cash transfers by 700% then rapidly scaled up the programme, and began searching for a targeting design with national character. Against this background, I trace the global policy idea of social protection in Zambia, first through social health insurance (SHI) and then social cash transfers (SCTs). This multi-level study examines the introduction and promotion of these models through the efforts of transnational agencies; their uneven adoption, with slow progress on SHI while SCTs have been adopted and implemented; and the rejection of a centrally designed cash transfer model in communities during implementation, leading directly to changes in design. I develop a framework that integrates policy transfer with multiple streams to analyse the politics of policy-making across global, national and local levels. The framework guides an in-depth qualitative investigation involving key informant interviews, focus group discussions and document analysis at multiple levels. The investigation goes beyond the phase of policy adoption to examine the interaction between global and local ideas during policy implementation, providing a holistic assessment of global policy transfer across these levels. Focusing on domestic receptivity to global policy ideas at different levels, I analyse the mechanisms through which domestic politics influences the global policy transfer process. I find that alignment between problem, policy and political streams continues to matter beyond agenda setting and policy adoption. It is also vital during implementation, which is a site of continued contestation and policy translation. In the case of cash transfers in Zambia, contested notions of social justice have emerged as being a key factor determining the alignment between global policy ideas and local ideas on the ground, centred on understandings of deservingness. The thesis concludes that the social cash transfer policy in Zambia has been shaped by the efforts of a transnationalised policy coalition to promote this global policy idea, interacting with national political dynamics and local ideas of deservingness. This case demonstrates that social and political receptivity to a global policy idea is determined by the level of alignment with domestic political interests, specifically survival strategies, as well as elite and popular paradigmatic ideas, shaping which global policy ideas travel and in what form.

Social policy reform following the Welfare Reform Act 2012 has led to a shift in demand for voluntary advice organisations that are both advising on and dealing with issues related to these changes simultaneously. The existing body of literature focusses on the operations of advice organisation Citizens Advice, this thesis expands the body of knowledge through an exploration of varying structures of voluntary advice organisations. The social policy reforms that have been introduced following the Welfare Reform Act 2012 are disproportionately affecting the most vulnerable individuals in society, although there remains little insight into the voluntary advice organisations that help individuals navigate these changes. Therefore, the main aim of this thesis was to gather an understanding of these experiences for voluntary advice organisations in order to aid future perceptions of social policy reform in the sector. Liverpool, one of the most heavily impacted cities following these reforms, was used as the fieldwork site for this research. Three case study sites were explored with voluntary organisations that varied in organisational structure, Federal, Local Providing and Local Empowering to discover how their experiences differed. Qualitative interviews were carried out with representatives from the roles within the hierarchy of each organisation, gathering comparative data regarding the differences in the experience of volunteers, employees and managers. This thesis reveals that volunteers at the 'front-line' of advice experience change most significantly as they develop the closest relationship to service users and their issues, whilst keeping abreast of fast-paced change within their often-irregular voluntary roles. This thesis also provides an understanding of the provision of advice at varying structures of voluntary advice organisations, exploring their role and the relationships that occur within local communities. Local organisations for example, have greater autonomy to provide advice that is community focussed. It contributes to the existing body of knowledge as it investigates a variety of organisational structures, highlighting that the experiences of social policy change do occur in different ways both within and between voluntary advice organisations. This thesis offers a broader understanding of the way in which voluntary advice organisations experience social policy reform, dependent on their organisational structure and their hierarchical relationships with service users.

Taking into account the relevance subjective well-being has acquired in international research and political agendas in the last decade, this dissertation explores people's judgements and feelings as an essential part of our understanding of well-being in Chile. Subjective well-being is understood as the perception that people have of their own lives and the context in which they are living. That perception includes life satisfaction evaluations, positive and negative feelings and assessments about their social environment. This thesis argues that a broader assessment of well-being in Chile should include subjective well-being analyses, examining people's living conditions beyond the classical macroeconomic indicators such as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and National Household Incomes. Several studies covering subjective well-being in Chile have demonstrated that Chilean people experience higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness, but they have neglected to explore a wider notion of subjective well-being. In contrast with international evidence focused on psychological subjective well-being and the interactions between people's perceptions and views on their societies, national research still understands subjective well-being as a sum of pleasurable emotions and feelings taking place at an individual level exclusively. Tackling those limitations, this dissertation contributes with a multidimensional subjective well-being analysis underpinned by the Positive Psychology and the Capability Approach and supported by three empirical studies. The first study examines subjective well-being in Chile accounting for the classical hedonic aspect including life satisfaction and happiness, but also involving a eudaimonic component measured by people's freedom of choice and having meaningful lives and purposes. The second study explores how Chileans' subjective well-being might be affected by their perceptions towards their society, accounting for their level of confidence in national political institutions and generalised trust. Finally, the third empirical chapter examines how well-being is impacted by three sets of capabilities related to material living conditions and promoted by Chilean social policy as key aspects for achieving Chileans' well-being. In turn, the results supported that subjective well-being is well reflected by the hedonic dimension, but also by a wider psychological well-being close to human flourishing. People's perceptions towards their social environment showed a higher effect on subjective well-being. Societal matters and social policies might positively or negatively influence people's evaluations and feelings; therefore, the notion of subjective well-being as an individual state should be reviewed, recognising that contextual aspects make a difference. Finally, some core aspects of social policy in Chile such as having access to healthcare, shelter, income and work were revealed to be crucial to achieving well-being, but are not enough for meaningful lives. Moreover, the findings also suggest that those aspects do not have the same relevance for all Chileans, indeed, according to specific demographic and socioeconomic attributes; there are some more relevant than others, supporting evidence for a more focalised national social policy in the future.

In-work benefits (IWBs), a form of income protection for the working poor, are receiving increasing international attention in the social policy field. Informed by the theories of welfare political economy, this thesis sets out an analytical framework to bring together the dynamics of institutions, ideas, and interest-power in the capitalist context of Hong Kong (HK). The research adopts a critical realist approach to an intensive-qualitative method that explains the rise of IWBs in HK from 2007 to 2017. It also critically examines the characteristics of IWBs and the trajectories of their development as a policy approach. Against the backdrop of a mixture of authoritarian approach, liberal market economy, and residual welfare model in HK, there are three research questions: (1) What are the nature and features of IWBs in HK? (2) What are the main factors in the emergence of IWBs in HK? (3) What are the theoretical and policy implications of IWBs in HK? The thesis reveals that labour market failure, the threat of closing the welfare-wage gap, budgetary surplus, business' endorsement, and the introduction of a poverty line were the conditions giving rise to the government's approval of IWBs in HK. The full-time and low-pay conditionality of IWBs are underpinned by a deservingness hierarchy and selective familialism, which is justified by varieties of work ethic. While this new form of new welfare relieves the fiscal burden of the working poor, its means-tested nature and tight conditionality discourages and marginalises some childless and precarious workers. Moreover, IWBs are arguably an institutional and geographical fix for the labour market in order to ensure its functioning and to increase the supply of workers. IWBs maintain the existing welfare relations of HK, yet they also display the tensions between a liberal labour market and the residual welfare model. While the complexities of pro-market IWBs come from their dual faces of wage-earner and employer welfare, incentive-led conditionality hides the exploitation in low pay employment and their disciplinary nature. Despite some research limitations, it is suggested that the political economy of IWBs in HK could contribute to social policy in general and specific policy changes.

This thesis contains three essays on the impact evaluation of social programs and public sector reforms. Chapter 2 investigates whether the effects of a cash transfer program persist or wear off in the long-run. I study the first two phases of Bono de Desarrollo Humano (BDH) in Ecuador, each of which lasted about five years. My identification strategy uses a regression discontinuity design and relies on the fact that at the threshold of eligibility, the second assignment to treatment (in 2008/9) was independent of the first assignment (in 2003). This allows me to disentangle the impact of a short exposure to the program (treatment during one phase) from a long exposure (treatment during two phases). Most of the gains in enrollment and schooling were achieved in the short-run among children that started treatment when they were about to start elementary school, eleventh grade or Baccalaureate. However, an extended exposure to BDH was not enough to keep raising children's education. Regarding labor market outcomes, BDH had a negative (not statistically significant) impact on the probability of working among young children but did not increase job opportunities among young adults in the long-run. Chapter 3 evaluates the impact on in-hospital mortality of a reform that made all health professionals working part-time switch to full-time contracts at public hospitals in Ecuador. I take advantage of the staggered adoption of the reform and hospital panel data to implement an event study to evaluate the impact of the reform. The results for the sample of admissions to the emergency department show that mortality in public hospitals decreased by 0.1% on the adoption year and by 0.2% one year later. Results were robust to several alternative specifications and to the inclusion of pre-reform characteristics that could have been used by policymakers to decide the order of implementation. More importantly, I show that the effects reported in this paper cannot be attributed to changes in other quality indicators at the hospital level like the length of stay or by changes in the patient mix. Chapter 4 studies the impact of increased liability risk facing physicians on the use of c-sections and on indicators of maternal and infant health. I take advantage of a legal reform that led to the hardening of sentences for cases of professional malpractice in Ecuador. I use a difference-in-difference strategy that compares the outcomes of two neighboring countries, Ecuador and Colombia, before and after the introduction of the reform and perform several parallel trend tests on the outcomes of interest and test for the stability of the demographic composition of both countries to support my identification strategy. During the five quarters following the reform, Ecuadorian doctors reduced the c-section rate by 1.1% among women aged 15 to 24 years, and by 0.9% among women aged 25 to 34 years. The c-section rate remained unaffected for women aged 35 to 44 years, possibly because doctors have less discretion over riskier births. Interestingly, the observed reduction in the c-section rate did not affect the health outcomes of mothers or newborns.

Separating causation from correlation in empirical studies is crucial for drawing the right conclusions for social-policy development. In the last decade, the emergence of increasingly sophisticated econometric techniques has opened up new ways to draw causal inferences in studies analysing observational data. This thesis contains four papers employing such techniques to answer important research questions in three different areas of social policy: education, health, and immigration. The first paper analyses the impact of retirement on mental health in ten European countries. It exploits thresholds created by state-pension ages in an individual-fixed effects instrumental-variable set-up, borrowing intuitions from the regressiondiscontinuity design literature, to deal with endogeneity in retirement behaviour. The results display no short-term effects of retirement on mental health, but a large negative longer-term impact. This impact survives a battery of robustness tests, and applies to women and men as well as people of different educational and occupational backgrounds similarly. The findings suggest that reforms inducing people to postpone retirement are not only important for making pension systems solvent, but with time could also pay a mental-health dividend among the elderly and reduce public health-care costs. The second paper studies whether independent-school competition involves a tradeoff between pupil wellbeing and academic performance. To test this hypothesis, it analyses data covering pupils across the OECD, exploiting historical Catholic opposition to state schooling for exogenous variation in independent-school enrolment shares. The paper finds that independent-school competition decreases pupil wellbeing but raises achievement and lowers educational costs. The analysis and balancing tests indicate these findings are causal. In addition, it finds several mechanisms behind the trade-off, including more traditional teaching and stronger parental achievement pressure. The third paper analyses the impact of refugee inflows on voter turnout in Sweden in a period when shifting immigration patterns made the previously homogeneous country increasingly heterogeneous. Analysing individual-level panel data and exploiting a national refugee placement programme to obtain plausibly exogenous variation in immigration, it finds that refugee inflows significantly raise the probability of voter turnout. Balancing tests on initial turnout as well as placebo tests regressing changes in turnout on future refugee inflows support the causal interpretation of our findings. The results are consistent with group-threat theory, which predicts that increased out-group presence spurs political mobilisation among in-group members. The fourth paper investigates the impact of adult education and training (AET) on employment outcomes in Sweden. Exploiting unusually rich data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies and using an inverse-probability weighted regression-adjustment estimator to deal with selection bias, it finds that AET raises the probability of doing paid work by 4 percentage points on average. This impact is entirely driven by non-formal, job-related AET, such as workshops and on-the-job training. The paper also finds that the effect - which increases with training intensity - is very similar across different types of non-formal, job-related AET. Specification and robustness tests indicate the estimates are causal. The results suggest that policies stimulating relevant AET take-up have promise as a way to secure higher employment rates in the future.

Attaching monetary values to non-market outcomes, goods and services has become a critical part of policy evaluation across OECD countries. The HM Treasury Green Book, the core policy evaluation guidance in the UK, requires that projects and policies be assessed using Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA), which compares the benefits and costs of a policy in monetary terms and hence requires valuation of the outcomes of a policy. Outside of public policy, the private sector is also increasingly interested in valuing the outcomes of their activities to measure the social value that they generate. However, valuing non-market goods such as education, health, crime, environment, and heritage is difficult because they are not traded in markets. Wellbeing Valuation (WV) is a relatively new method, first developed in 2002. There are a number of technical problems with the method related to the statistical estimation methodology and a number of issues that have not been explored in full such as how to interpret the values. This has restricted the method's use in policy evaluation to date. The aim of this thesis is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the WV approach and to improve the methodology so that it can be applied robustly in CBA, policy evaluation and in social value studies. I do this by developing a complete theory of WV and a new set of technical criteria to be used to assess the rigour of WV studies. I then develop a new statistical method for WV, the Three Step Wellbeing Valuation (3S-WV) method, and demonstrate how it solves for the main technical issues and improves the values and results derived from the method. I also provide a new framework for interpreting values derived from WV. I showcase the new 3S-WV method on a case study to value the non-pecuniary benefits of employment.

Immigration has changed the composition of Germany's resident population, turning the country into one of the most ethnically diverse European countries. The pressure of changing demographics have brought to the forefront of public debate questions about who belongs, and who should get access to public resources. Against this backdrop, the research explores how administrative practices in local job centres construct inequalities in access to basic subsistence benefits. The study focuses on European Union migrant citizens who constitute one of the largest, yet overlooked immigrant groups in Germany. So far, scholarship has identified the various inequalities that shape EU migrant citizens' entitlements in law and policy, but has focussed less of how processes of implementation shape substantive access to benefits and services. To that end, the analysis explores the interplay between front-line bureaucrats as gatekeepers, who interpret and potentially subvert eligibility criteria, and EU migrants who engage or do not engage in a claim-making process, and how understandings of deservingness and belonging play into EU claimants' benefit access in practice. To address these processes, the research comprises of 119 qualitative interviews with key informants, job centre staff and EU migrant claimants, along with participant observation in three Berlin-based job centres. The data revealed how claims to benefits and services of EU migrant citizens are filtered at street-level. This happens through administrative practices of enabling or blocking access, entailing processes of bureaucratic discrimination against EU claimant groups when observed in marginal or no employment, especially if of Eastern European origin. The study explains the inequalities in access through the interplay between, first, streetlevel perceptions of EU citizens' social legitimacy in claiming German social-assistance type benefits or lack thereof, and, second, institutional constraints, such as the prevailing economic accountability logic, legal uncertainties or token diversity policies. The analysis unravels the implicit normative 'cultural conditionality' logic, which contributes to shaping the inequalities in access observed at the local level. Such ideas about socio-cultural adaptation find their expression in expectations of EU migrants to demonstrate belonging to substantiate their social entitlements, in the form of German language skills and acquiescence to dominant societal and bureaucratic norms. The findings contribute to an enhanced understanding of the links between social protection regulation and internal governance processes of EU migration, by highlighting how welfare administrators are involved in shaping the settlement of EU migrants in a borderless European space.

Adopting an exploratory approach, this thesis seeks to understand social policy as a tool of foreign policy by addressing the following two research questions: ‘What explains the relationship between social policy and foreign policy post-WWII?’; and ‘Is there a relationship between welfare state type and the social sector foreign aid of donors?’. The thesis argues that social policy has not only a substantial, but also a relational foundation; therefore, the exercise of social policy is context specific. Through quantitative exploratory analysis and the construction of historical narratives examining this relationship in the cases of the British Empire and the United States, this thesis finds that the relationship between social policy and foreign policy is neither mechanical nor deterministic. Together, these cases illustrate the importance of understanding foreign aid in the social sector not only in relation to domestic politics and policy, but also within the geopolitical relationships underpinning the use of this instrument. These findings contribute to broader efforts to understand welfare state regimes in global context and to understand social policymaking in transnational relief, with implications for global social governance.

Policy makers worldwide are increasingly realising the importance of wellbeing. Maintaining mental wellbeing is important for positive life outcomes, such as relationships, employment, and physical health. It can also act as a buffer against the negative effects of stress. In this thesis, I am interested in the individual differences that determine why some individuals have better wellbeing and respond better to wellbeing interventions than others. In addition, I investigate the close relationship between social connections and wellbeing. I predominately concentrate on late adolescence and emerging adulthood because this is a critical but underexplored developmental period for mental health. Three broad conclusions can be drawn from the projects in this thesis. Firstly, I find that social connections are often positively associated, such as providing social support, but they can also be negatively associated with wellbeing, such as through negative social comparisons. Tapping into how individuals socially interact and connect with others could be an important wellbeing improving intervention, and further research is needed here to disentangle mechanisms and direction of causality. My second conclusion is that tackling inequality should be of high priority for policy makers as inequality contributes to lower population level wellbeing levels. Finally, my findings suggest that one of the ways to ensure we do not increase existing inequalities when we make policies is to have a greater focus on personalised interventions and policies. Environments do not just passively happen to us - even environmental measures such as social support are mediated by genetics. Therefore, one-size-fits-all policies should be replaced with more personalised approaches. Overall, my projects add to the evidence base that can now be collated with other research outputs to produce policy recommendations. My thesis emphasises the need for evidence based on a range of methodologies to give us the most comprehensive view of wellbeing.

With the dramatic changes in the extent to which women and men contribute to unpaid domestic work and paid employment, work and family life reconciliation (WFLR) has become more prominent than ever before within the European Union (EU) agenda. Particularly from the 2000s, the EU began to require a relatively stronger convergence from member and candidate states. However, this does not necessarily result in total policy change. Existing domestic political and cultural conditions may facilitate or prohibit the change at national levels. This comparative study thus endeavours to examine the Europeanisation patterns of WFLR policies of a longstanding candidate country, Turkey and a founding member country, Germany, over the last decade, with a particular emphasis on intervening domestic actors and factors. To interrogate the subject, the study draws on a combination of Europeanisation literature and New Institutionalism (NI) theory. The term Europeanisation has been applied when explaining the domestic impact of the EU on Turkish and German WFLR policies, whereas the NI theory has been applied when explaining the domestic responses to the EU influence. This study employs a qualitative research design and adopts a comparative approach. The comparison is conducted between the Europeanisation process in Germany and the Europeanisation process in Turkey around this specific policy area. The data have been collected through the combination of document analysis and 80 semi-structured in-depth interviews with EU representatives; German and Turkish political elites; representatives of civil society organisations (CSO); and academics. The collected data is then analysed through the combination of thematic analysis and process tracing. The findings show that, at the time when the EU started to require a stronger convergence, the gaps between the German and Turkish WFLR policies and the EU WFLR policies were considerable. Therefore, each country received a high level of adaptational pressure in this specific policy area. In response to this adaptational pressure, both governments introduced a number of laws with respect to WFLR. However, a close examination of these laws indicates an incomplete and a contradictory Europeanisation process in each country. This study viii further found the simultaneous existence of domestic actors supporting the Europeanisation process and of those supporting the status quo; their contributions to the process are key reasons for this contradiction and incompleteness, which adds to the view that Europeanisation is a twofold process, which comprises both the push from the EU and the pull by the domestic actors. Through its uniquely developed theoretical framework that compares Europeanisation patterns of a founding member and a candidate state from an actor-centred lens, this study contributes to three different literature strands: Europeanisation, gender studies, and comparative social policy studies. Additionally, due to the wide range of data collected throughout the fieldwork, this study also provides an empirical contribution by giving more insight into Europeanisation and social policy knowledge at national levels.

This thesis explores how the cumulative impacts of welfare reform and public sector spending cuts impact upon the human rights of benefit recipients living in Coventry. Its central premise is the application of the principles of the capability approach to examine whether the ‘Welfare-to- Work’ ideology behind the welfare reform agenda helps individuals to flourish, using qualitative longitudinal research methods to provide a rich insight into the lived experiences of individuals. Drawing upon qualitative research conducted with benefit claimants in Coventry, this research operationalizes the capability approach to investigate how people react differently and why some developed resilience in the face of changes to benefits and services whilst others struggled. It assesses whether the capability approach is a suitable and valuable framework with which to measure the cumulative impacts of welfare reform policies and austerity public sector cuts on the lived experiences of individuals. This doctoral research brings together three strands of enquiry to form a unique contribution to knowledge, by examining the cumulative impacts of welfare reform policies and public sector spending cuts in the UK through the lens of the lived experiences of individuals significantly affected by them and using the capability approach to reveal how their human rights have been eroded by the welfare-to-work ideology underpinning the welfare reform agenda. It concludes that the capability approach provides a valuable insight into the cumulative impacts of welfare reform policies and public sector spending cuts, by revealing the effects welfare reform and austerity measures have had on the emotional and agency capabilities of individuals in addition to impacts on their income, health, and housing. It argues that listening to and meeting the needs of those who have suffered most from welfare reform and austerity measures can create a welfare system that encourages people to flourish, rather than flounder.

This thesis investigates everyday encounters between benefit recipients and street-level welfare agencies in an era of behavioural conditionality, marketised ‘activation’, and neoliberal paternalism. Central to this thesis is a concern with the relational dynamics that policies of ‘behavioural conditionality’ and ‘mandatory activation’ produce, explored through reflexive analysis of the researcher’s own experiences as a street-level activation worker, and thirty in-depth interviews with former colleagues, other street-level staff, and benefit recipients. Informed by relational and psychosocial theorisations of both the subject and street-level welfare organisations, the thesis looks at the interactions between symbolic/ideological representation, individual agency, and street-level organisation. Arguing that attention to the dynamic, libidinal investments of street-level employees casts familiar street-level practices in a new light, the thesis draws attention to a dynamic of illusio-disillusionment (Bourdieu, 2000) among street-level staff, re-rendering familiar practices of ‘creaming and parking’ in terms of punishment and protection. Similarly, it is argued that specific instances of support, indifference, and/or sanction do not exist as discrete experiences in the life of claimants, but as ongoing possibilities, producing a situation of ever-present surveillance and threat. In this way, conditional activation services come to resemble a protection racket, in which both the threat and means of defence are produced simultaneously. These dynamic materialisations of behavioural conditionality are situated with respect to the ideology of neoliberal paternalism, which at street-level takes the form of magical voluntarism, and the enforcement of an anti-sociological imaginary which, it is argued, results in the denial and effective privatisation of the troubles, difficulties, and needs that bring people to welfare services in the first place.

This thesis examines the dynamics of welfare state change in China since 2012. The following questions are addressed: what is the nature of China's welfare regime? Where is China now in relation to welfare state development? In order to answer these questions, the notion of an informal security regime (ISR) proposed by Gough et al. (2004) is used as an ideal typical model against which to understand changes in China's welfare system. Going further, the respective concepts of path dependency and political legitimacy are deployed to develop an in-depth understanding of the 'welfare challenges' that confront contemporary China. Drawing on qualitative elite interviews with a wide range of social policy actors and leading academics, this thesis provides answers to these questions using a combination of secondary literature analysis, documentary analysis, and the analysis of interviewees' understandings and interpretations of the major reforms in the core areas of health-care, pension provision and social assistance. The findings show that, after decades of consistent efforts of improving welfare arrangements in key areas of social policy, there are signs that China is beginning to move beyond the ISR - though incrementally and inconsistently - towards a welfare system more in keeping with Gough's understanding of a 'security regime'. For the purpose of serving the CCP's legitimacy, social policy has been identified as a new economic growth point and consequently not subordinate to economic policy so much as the 'other side of that coin'. There are nevertheless some significant additional challenges such as China's demographic problem, especially aging issues, that pose unique difficulties for policy makers. Above all, however, the fragmented nature of Chinese governance institutions and the country's regulatory framework makes finding solutions to fragmentation the major governmental objective. Therefore, the direction of China's welfare development depends on President Xi's ability successfully to reform the welfare system, although success is not assured because of the inevitable complexity of domestic and international challenges.

Theorists have argued that the effectiveness of dialogue about equality-related public policy has been limited by a range of factors (e.g. limited representation of minority groups or dominant discourses about ‘equality’ that prevent wider discussion). This study focuses on how we might create public dialogue more in keeping with what people really value around the topic of equality. The study does this by firstly mapping English local authority approaches to engaging ethnic minorities in public policy dialogue. This is followed by a ‘qualitative experiment’ which compares the effects of two popular models of public engagement (‘multiculturalism’ and ‘interculturalism’) on participants’ experiences. The study identifies important conventions of dialogue associated with ‘representative claim-making’ that can hinder critical deliberation of equality-related public policy issues. The study also highlights particular aspects of facilitation practice which appear to improve research participants’ levels of autonomy and the breadth of equality issues discussed through public dialogue.

This research examines the financial assistance given by parents to their adult children and the extent to which it is influenced by social policy. In recent years these intergenerational financial transfers have been the subject of much research and a great deal has been learnt about when and why parents make the decision to provide financial assistance (Cox, 1987; Kohli, 1999; Albertini & Kohli, 2012). Furthermore, there has been considerable research on apparent differences in such financial assistance across countries and the extent to which this is attributable to differences in the social policies of these countries (Albertini, Kohli, & Vogel, 2007; Schenk, Dykstra, & Maas, 2010; Brandt & Deindl, 2013). The aim of this research is to further this understanding by considering transfers from different perspectives, first by considering the receipt of transfers rather than the giving of transfers and then by exploring the transfer decision in the context of multi-child families. Through these approaches and by using new data sources and analytical methods, the research estimates the association between social policy and intergenerational financial transfers. Furthermore, it was the specific aim of this research to consider whether such an association would explain cross-national variation in transfer behaviour and the importance of social policies relative to other determinants of transfer behaviour. To achieve these aims a variety of quantitative methods were used to model the giving and receiving of transfers using data from the Survey for Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the European Union’s Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). The analysis of this latter dataset represents an important contribution in itself as it allows for the exploration of the receipt of transfers in a comparative perspective for the first time. To incorporate the complex and rich nature of these two datasets, multilevel models are used to model households over time and children within families. The results of these analyses suggest that there is a small association between certain policies and parents providing financial assistance to their adult children. Those in receipt of larger public pensions are marginally more likely to provide financial assistance to their adult children than those with smaller public pensions. As for adult children themselves, those receiving financial assistance from the state in the form of child benefit, housing benefits, social exclusion benefits and educational benefits are fractionally more likely to receive from their parents as well. The estimated coefficients and maximum effect size of such social policies are very small compared to time invariant factors which include the parent’s financial resources and the number of siblings the child has. In addition, the cross-national variation in transfer behaviour identified within the analyses is considerably smaller than in previous research. The research concludes that social policies are of less importance with regards to transfer behaviour than previous research has suggested. Whilst the research identifies a clear association between social policies and transfer behaviour, it is relatively weak compared to other factors. However the research stops short of concluding that social policies do not matter, instead suggesting that future research should critically assess the importance of intergenerational transfers in determining the adult child’s outcomes.

This thesis investigates the emergence, functioning and evolution of voluntary, informal networks of regulators. Via a combination of inductive and deductive reasoning, qualitative and quantitative methods, this research sheds light on thus far unexplored mechanisms of networked regulatory collaboration. These are: the conditions leading to spontaneous network emergence and consolidation into an institutional structure; the factors determining network members’ ties to each other; the strategies that network members deploy to ensure network survival; the conditions facilitating network entrepreneurship; and the role of informal networks in the implementation of foreign policy agendas. Through six empirical chapters, divided in three parts, this thesis explains why regulators network. The core argument is that regulators use networks as levers: they leverage their collective collaboration in order to obtain goals that are both individually and collectively desirable. The first part shows that they network for control: regulators form networks whenever they face concrete threats to the scope of their authority and the extent of their autonomy. The second part shows that regulators network for resources: similarity in the political economy and expertise explain the structure of regulators’ relationships together with resources, as regulators rely on their peers to compensate for their scarce staff numbers. The third part shows that regulators network for survival, and that the institutional integration of networks facilitates regulators’ network entrepreneurship. Further, it shows that international organisations and regulators deem informal networks capable of fostering policy change; hence, they export regulatory networks to target jurisdictions in the explicit attempt of replicating their success formula. The thesis accomplishes this ambitious research agenda by focusing on four empirical cases of transnational/trans-jurisdictional networks of energy regulators: the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER), the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) of the USA, and their respective progeny, i.e. the Association of Mediterranean Energy Regulators (MedReg) and the Energy Regional Regulatory Association (ERRA) of Central and Eastern Europe.

Perry Anderson, one of the founders of the British New Left, remarked that Sweden was ‘not so much a normal object of real knowledge as a didactic political fable’.1 In 1961, when Anderson wrote ‘Mr Crosland’s Dreamland’ it was self-evident to him that Sweden and the wider Nordic region was a model of social democracy. Today this question is less straightforward. I argue that while there is clear agreement that there is such a thing as a Nordic model, it is much less obvious whose political fable it really is. In this thesis, I will demonstrate that conflict over the meaning of the Nordic model is increasingly transnational and that the Nordic has become an important topic in recent discussions of public policy in the UK for actors from social democrats to free-market liberals. To illustrate this contention the thesis uses three case studies dealing with a range of understandings of a Nordic model of political economy; recent public health discourses about the Nordic countries in England, and a ‘Swedish’ Free School reform which was enacted in England and Wales in 2010. These case studies are structured using a form of discourse analysis and a governance paradigm which theorises the roles and strategies of actors engaged in the creation, implementation and maintenance of public policy. I conclude by arguing that the Nordic model has generally been deployed as a means to neutralise well-established antagonisms in public policy programmes. This is as much a feature of free-market liberal discourse as social democratic discourse.

National and international policy actors use social enterprises in health system reform, but their meaning is contested. This inter-disciplinary research examines the logics of social enterprise. It contributes to health policy development in England and Tanzania by developing knowledge and theory of how and why they are used in health system reform. Institutional logic provides the inductive research framework using comparative, cross sectional case study design. Data collection methods included interviews with policy actors, literature, websites and other media using content, context, time series and narrative analysis. Three core characteristics of social enterprise were common to England and Tanzania: a social purpose, furthered with use of profits and social entrepreneurial outlook of actors in response to a market. The social determinants of health could be aligned with organisations’ social purpose. Three groups of organisations emerged: Holistic, Health care and Lifestyle. Social enterprises’ organisational strategies and their business models in each of these groups both respond to and are contingent on the state and market design of the health system. Socio-cultural and resource contexts constrained or enabled social entrepreneurs’ ability to achieve social innovation. The contribution of social enterprises to achieving health equity goals are not translated into the logic of state funded health care services or the market in either country. This is despite advocacy by policy actors and social enterprise policies in England. In Tanzania policy makers do not recognise the potential of social enterprises to achieve health equity goals. In both countries policy implementers and influencers were able to demonstrate how they contribute to health equity through their organisational strategies. Some social entrepreneurs acted collectively as institutional entrepreneurs to advocate for health system change. A framework and a diagnostic tool have been developed which contain the contingent variables required to introduce this logic into a health system.

This dissertation explores the role of relationships with front-line officers on the subjective wellbeing of the recipients of the conditional cash transfer programme in Mexico, Oportunidades-Prospera. To do so, it builds bridges between the literatures on wellbeing, development and public policy. In recent decades, wellbeing has acquired greater significance in public policy with the interest of changing the conceptualization of progress from one driven by economic growth to one which takes quality of life as its ultimate aim. Much attention has been placed on measuring wellbeing for national policy deliberation. This dissertation, instead, is interested in understanding how taking a wellbeing approach may contribute to street-level development: to the design, practice and implementation of social policies and programmes. The value of wellbeing is that it draws attention to dimensions of experience that policy has tended to under-estimate or ignore. In this respect, one of the most consistent findings of wellbeing scholarship is the centrality of social relationships in shaping action and driving how people evaluate their lives. While the main emphasis has been on close relationships, this dissertation asks how the relationships created during the implementation of social programmes may influence wellbeing – and hence the overall impact of policies themselves. This research focuses on relationships at the health clinics which clients of Oportunidades-Prospera are required to attend as a condition for receiving a cash transfer. It follows a mixed-methods approach that reveals that relationships with health officers have a significant role on recipients’ sense of what they can do and be in different domains. It also finds that the quality of these relationships has two dimensions, positive and negative, and that these have differential effects on wellbeing. The study concludes that paying attention to the wellbeing implications of officer-recipient relationships deepens understanding of the overall effect of social programmes on their clients, highlighting unintended effects that are usually unaccounted for. In addition, the significance of relationships in implementation indicates a vital dimension of the policy process that requires direct attention if social policy and programmes are to achieve their full potential to improve people’s wellbeing.

Welfare reform in middle income countries, where formal institutions conventionally have an exclusionary character and informal institutions are central to social welfare, has been marked by a drastic rise of means-tested social assistance schemes. This dissertation analyses, with an empirical focus on Turkey, the potential of these schemes to expand social rights by creating new formal entitlements for previously excluded groups. The number and the scope of social assistance schemes in Turkey have shown a remarkable increase, especially after the 2001 economic crisis, accompanied by significant institutionalisation. Yet, we argue that whilst social assistance has grown distinctively and become an integral part of the emerging welfare regime, certain characteristics of the previous regime were ultimately reproduced within new institutions due to the content of current schemes and the institutional structure of implementation. These include the association of mainstream welfare institutions with social insurance, the ambiguous role of the state towards the excluded parts of the society, the reliance on family relations and informal employment, and the prevalence of paternalist or clientelist motivations. Consequently, the potential of social assistance to extend formalised rights to the entire population was undermined, and the outcome has been the consolidation of a semi-formal welfare regime. To substantiate this argument, the dissertation develops a historical institutionalist framework and examines the elements of institutional change and continuity as well as the processes of change. Our three empirical chapters then focus on the development of legal, organisational, ideational and political bases of social assistance; trends in policy outcomes from the perspectives of decommodification, commodification, defamilialisation and declientelisation; and the functioning of social assistance through semi-autonomous foundations at the local level. Empirically, we build our argument on a comprehensive evidence base including a wide range of policy documents and qualitative interviews. Theoretically, we discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on welfare regimes and institutionalism, stressing the importance of implementation structures, the co-existence of institutional change and continuity, and the suggestion of a semi-formal regime type.

This thesis examines the European Union’s Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the field of cultural policy. The OMC, a method of intergovernmental policy coordination that is centrally coordinated by the European Commission, was introduced in the cultural field in 2008. Using a case study of Policy Priority A in the 2011-2014 Work Plan for Culture, this thesis examines how the OMC operates as well as what outcomes it produces. It does so using a sociological institutionalism theoretical framework, supplemented with insights from the literatures on multi-level governance and policy learning. It uses a combination of research methods including document analysis, interviews with key actors, and participant observation, ultimately leading to new insights into the processes and practices of EU policy coordination. Findings on the processes of coordination reveal insights into the EU’s inter-institutional dynamics and demonstrate that the European Commission is a key player in the culture OMC. They also indicate considerable heterogeneity in how Member States ‘approach’ participation in the OMC and indicate that ultimately there is a weak connection between the OMC and national-level politics. Findings also show that the outcomes of coordination are multifaceted; while few examples of direct political and programmatic change were found, there is a complex set of other outcomes, including increased vertical coordination, socialisation and networking, and heuristic learning and concept usage. The thesis’ findings make contributions to several multi-disciplinary areas of academic research. They add most directly to the literatures on EU cultural policy, specifically on the processes and outcomes of policy coordination in the field, and contribute a new sectoral case study to the existing literature on the Open Method of Coordination as well. They also make broader contributions to the study of cultural policy (in particular cultural policy approached from a political science/public policy perspective), policy learning, and European governance and integration.

This thesis is about development donor organisations' enthusiasm for social accountability programmes. It argues that when they are based on neoliberal conceptions of civil society, they complement and strengthen clientelistic networks. They do this by rendering activism a technical exercise, depoliticising it and blinding donors to both its democratic and undemocratic potentials. In doing so, they displace and, sometimes purposefully, ignore actually existing civil societies' histories as arenas for identity formation, contests and alliances over who gets what, when and how. This reduces the prospects of programmes identifying and supporting radical forms of political participation that give citizens a say in decisions that affect their lives. To make this argument, the thesis details research on a voluntary social accountability programme in Pakistan. It explores the meanings it was given by participants, the processes they engaged in that brought it to life, and the power and politics it was embedded in. It also conducts a critical discourse analysis of the idea of social accountability in texts from the programme's donor; the United Kingdom's Department of International Development. It is shown how efforts to translate the programme's ground realities into its donor's dominant discourses wrote out the identities and aspirations of its participants, pushing the more radical to its margins and turning the most powerful into its experts. From this, a theory of 'isomorphic activism' is developed to account for how such programmes' wider democratic aims can be undermined whilst still achieving their donors' desired outputs. The challenges the thesis highlights are important given recent calls for development programmes to change by whom and how politics is done, whilst granting local ownership to participants, reporting their impact and demonstrating value for money. They should also be of interest to those concerned by the spread of marketprinciples within donor organisations' ways of working with civil society, and how they are welcomed, appropriated or simply ignored on the ground.

This thesis addresses a number of topics which are not normally combined: John Rawls, homelessness, and social policy. The research is a piece of applied philosophy which seeks to address claims about a disconnection between philosophical frameworks and tangible political problems. It argues that there is a role for philosophers, and philosophical frameworks, within the policy-making process. By applying philosophy to policy we can create normative accounts of the development and impact of legislation. The philosophical framework used within this research is John Rawls’ conception of justice as fairness. The work outlines the liberal principle of legitimacy and argues that Rawls’ concept of reasonableness can, and should, be used to justify the intervention of policy in individuals’ lives. The concept of reasonableness can be used as a regulatory mechanism in order to test whether social policy meets a standard of social justice. The metric used for this standard is whether the worst off in society have the capacity to create and pursue a conception of the good, a central capability of citizens as effective agents. Through modifying or emphasising certain Rawlsian concepts, the research develops the Difference Principle as a regulatory test to be applied to social policy. The final part of the research provides this initial application. The Housing (Wales) Act is used as a case study to assess whether the test as developed is able to create normative interpretations of specific pieces of legislation. It identifies a particular legal tool – the Pereira Test – as problematic on a normative account. The application of the Difference Principle demonstrates that this particular legal tool undermines individuals’ ability to safeguard their fundamental interests, and their capacity to create and pursue a conception of the good.

This thesis aims to contribute to a personalist approach to policy. First, it covers representations of the social and by implication the person in third way approaches from New Labour to Conservative policy. To empirically demonstrate what views of the person exist, a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is conducted in the area of higher education governance. The argument put forward is that a view of the social and person exists in higher education governance and this affects policy proposals and initiatives. Thus, it is viewed necessary to present an explicit view of the person that then informs alternative policy directions. For this purpose, the work of Margaret Archer is utilised but with some revisions proposed. The argued realist model of personhood presented is then adopted as the basis of a relational policy direction defined by a homo relatus conception of personhood.

Placing politics in time can greatly enrich our understanding of complex social dynamics. The question this thesis tries to answer is which mechanism led to the change in attitudes of the German Social Democratic Party and the British Labour Party towards the welfare state during the period from 1990 to 2010 and which effects in consequence these changes had on the existing welfare states. This thesis builds on the welfare state categorization work done by the Danish sociologist Gosta Esping-Andersen ("Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism"). However, the thesis focuses its in- depth analysis on Germany and the United Kingdom as prototypical conservative and liberal states. The heuristic text analysis, as well as the discourse analysis of party leader speeches, party manifestos and programmes, as well as the conducted expert interviews reveal that social, political, technological and economic changes during the given time period radically challenged and changed the norms and values of the welfare providers and with it the given welfare state, as well as the meaning, function and value of work. While many may argue that it was mainly the neo-liberal political and economic style that changed the attitude towards the welfare state, it was in fact just the trigger for a radical change in the interpretation of the basic social democratic values of freedom, justice and solidarity. This change made significant welfare state reforms inevitable and only with further changes can a balance and satisfaction within the welfare state system and within all welfare providing sectors (the state, the market, households and the third sector) be achieved. A new balanced social democratic approach for the 21st century is a ‘symmetrical welfare state’ that stands for mirror-image equality.

Issues of ‘wellbeing’ and ‘happiness’ are becoming more and more prevalent in discussions of social policy and in the provision of healthcare services. In recent years, the maximisation of a nation’s ‘happiness’ has emerged as both a key policy objective and as a central focus within social, political and economic research, with public policy makers around the world having demonstrated a growing interest in national accounts of ‘wellbeing’. In the UK context, this growing interest is comprised of a perceived need to ‘know’ ‘happiness’ and ‘wellbeing’ better, so that they might be maximised. Such attitudes and beliefs made possible the introduction of four new questions to the Annual Population Survey that were specifically designed to measure the UK’s “subjective wellbeing” (now referred to as “individual life satisfaction” following revisions in subsequent years). In addition to this, in 2010 a non-profit organisation named Action for Happiness (AfH) was founded which sought to maximise the ‘happiness’ of society by offering individual members help and training towards living a ‘happier’ life - an endeavour which is understood to be necessitated by the stagnation of ‘happiness’ in modern Western societies. This thesis seeks to critically account for the emergence of such social and political practices – or ‘happiness agenda’ - and does so from a poststructuralist, post-Marxist standpoint. This is achieved by utilising the specific methodological strategy developed by Glynos & Howarth (2007) which constitutes a retroductive, deconstructive, approach to accounting for socio-political phenomena. In doing so, three types of logics underpinning these practices are identified, presenting an explanation as to what, how and why these practices are. Accounting for the emergence of such a ‘happiness agenda’ enables it (and its emergence) to be critiqued – specifically, the notion contained within it that maximised individual ‘happiness’ constitutes social progression. Indeed, central to the critique of the ‘happiness agenda’ that this thesis presents is an acknowledgement of the need of a socio-political equality agenda, where ‘social progression’ is instead conceptualised as maximised social equality.

Since the late-1990s, advanced economies have converged on an ‘active’ social policy agenda aimed at maximising employment. Consequently, women are no longer treated as caregivers. Rather, they are required and assumed to be in employment. Although gender has moved from margins to the mainstream of comparative welfare state research in recent years, the agenda of ‘gendering’ the analysis of welfare states under activation remains incomplete. This three-paper thesis contributes to completing this agenda. Papers 1 and 2 assess activation strategies towards lone mothers who, as sole breadwinners and caregivers within their households, are a ‘litmus test’ of gendered social rights. Focusing on the UK, Paper 1 shows that, against the commonplace characterisation of the UK as a pioneer of ‘making work pay’, changes to the UK’s tax-benefit system since 2010 have weakened lone mothers’ financial incentives to work beyond a few hours a week. Paper 2 subsequently builds on Paper 1 in dimensional and geographical scope by examining how active labour market and family policies across 22 welfare states help or hinder lone mothers’ employment. It shows that cross-national variations in support for maternal activation are not well captured by the commonplace dichotomy within the mainstream literature between a Nordic-style ‘train-first’ approach to activation and an Anglo-Saxon ‘work-first’ approach. Paper 3 then extends Papers 1 and 2 in conceptual terms. It argues that analysing women’s social risks under activation requires looking not just at active labour market and family policies. Also important are gender boardroom quotas and other regulatory policies that set numerical targets for women in top corporate board and executive positions. This is because a ‘critical mass’ (23-40 per cent) of women in top management can generate important ‘trickle-down’ benefits, which can help to alleviate some of the ‘new’ social risks (e.g. work/care conflicts, in-work poverty) faced by women at the bottom of the labour market under activation.

This thesis is an attempt to answer the following question: how and why was the social welfare system in Egypt altered under the government of Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011)? Literatures on the determinants, objectives and structures of social welfare regimes predominantly assume democratic systems of government. They claim that the political influence of organised labour is the most important driving force for the expansion of social welfare systems. This driving force is effective only in open, democratic political arena. This thesis therefore argues that the case of Egypt requires us to consider social welfare regimes within the context of authoritarian resilience. According to this corpus of work, institutional change under authoritarian regimes can best be explained as a product of government survival strategies, strategies which seek to maximise the interests of the ruling elite, especially their political leaders (rather than the political influence of organised labour which drives social welfare systems in democratic countries). Although the ruling elite under authoritarian rule use social welfare systems in their survival strategies, the strategies differ in their context or ideology. Egypt’s first President, Gamal Abdul Nasser, designed and introduced a social welfare system which supported his primary goal of industrialisation. The income-redistribution aspects of his social welfare system were designed to mobilise popular political support for his regime from the middle and low-income classes, especially urban workers. His successor, Anwar al Sadat, relied still further on the income-redistribution function of the social welfare system, as a means of partially compensating those elements of society which could be considered ‘losers’ from his policy of economic opening (infitah). Whereas his policies expanded the economic base of regime support from the working class and the public sector to the growing business elites, he fortunately obtained several external resources, such as economic aid (from the United States, in particular), fees from the Suez Canal and oil exports. By exploiting these resources as sources to expand the social welfare system, Sadat was able to compensate the ‘losers’ and to maintain political legitimacy with these lower classes through welfare re-distribution instruments. His strategy strengthened the populist feature of the social welfare system. This thesis argues that change in the social welfare system during the Mubarak era was bounded by the logic of the ‘social contract’, which was reinforced by the expansion of populist welfare provision during the Sadat era. Sadat’s strategy led to fiscal deficit and prevented economic growth in the Mubarak era. Rationalisation of the programmes was indeed advocated by the international financial institutions and the Mubarak government did appear to initiate reforms. However, when looked at closely, the thesis reveals that these reforms did not result in significant reductions in government expenditures on social welfare as was supposedly intended. Despite a decline in external resources, the regime maintained expenditures, ‘thinning’ out the benefits of the welfare system where it could, but never fully engaging in deep structural reform. Mubarak’s government was caught in an unresolvable dilemma. Economic liberalisation in general created a new alliance between the ruling elite and the growing class of businessmen. However, the authoritarian regime still relied on a legacy of claims to redistributive justice for its legitimacy. As a decline in external resources cut away the regime’s capacity to deliver this through structural aspects of the economy, the regime increasingly relied on social welfare programmes to alleviate poverty and assuage political grievances. Regime fear of direct political protests increasingly drove social welfare policy, with the regime compensating for the effects of liberalisation in one side of the economy by spending money it could ill afford in another. The strategy was itself a fundamental contradiction and inherently unsustainable. As a result, a decline in distributive resources revealed a failure in the social welfare system – enduring fiscal misallocation and neglecting social problems (such as poverty and unemployment).

From the 1990s, welfare state and civil society in Taiwan were confronted with challenges and opportunities brought by population ageing. The author chooses NPOs with "Active Ageing" programs for the elderly, a group thriving as a consequence of Taiwan's unique transitional democratization and privatization under Neoliberalism, as a case to systematically investigate the governance structure. Four core NPOs of various scales and capacities are sampled while their stakeholders are also interviewed. Findings reveal that after the pension reform made possible by social movement and electoral politics, these institutionalized social forces secure their position in the welfare delivery system. However, problems remain unresolved because of structural inertia while NPOs operate under the changing field frame and conflicting institutional logics between the welfare state and civil society. Though partially impeded, NPOs develop an East-Asian way of solution with various counterplots. Contrasting rationales of networking explain NPOs' diverse achievements while quasi-subordination and structural loop consolidate respective constituency. Four patterns of perceived relational social capital relate to NPOs' networking practices and institutional settings. The connection among institutions, networking configurations, and relations further crystalizes the tripartite governance structure composed of the institutional, technical, and social environment. Legitimation of means functions mainly within the institutional environment while legitimation of ends through technical and social environment also justifies NPOs' social appropriateness. Various types of legitimacy are conferred to NPOs at different development stages while both formal and informal norms guide NPOs' behavior in the two-dimensional governing kinetics. Through this case study, the author also demonstrates how a meso-level approach of organizational study, integrating Sociological Institutionalism and Organizational Social Capital Theory, possibly sheds lights on the different areas of Sociology, especially those of social movement, NPOs, and ageing society.

The project mainly seeks to explain the structural logic behind the welfare expansion trend in three developed East Asian democracies-Korea, Japan, and Taiwan-since 1990. The major finding of the research is that the dispersed power structure (e.g. coalition, minority, divided governments) was a hitherto unnoticed significant political factor behind the transformation of fragmented, indirect, and weak welfare benefits into universal, direct, and generous ones. Unlike the conventional approach using welfare expenditure data in analysing welfare politics, the project examined possible relations between the changes in power structure and the legislative activities of major political actors using the whole universe of bills-roughly 50,000 in total-in three nations during the past two decades. Among others, the research focused on how dimensions such as the number, the success ratio, or the primary political sponsors have changed along with the different levels of power dispersion/concentration applying regression analyses. Moreover, the key analysis includes both orthodox and unorthodox social policies and applies multiple methods (e.g. social network analysis, media content analysis, or theory-informed narratives) to verify/triangulate/fine-tune findings from the legislation patterns. The result suggests that when bargaining among a number of parties/politicians prevailed, welfare policy tended to be premised on the lowest common denominator-the median voters such as consumers, women, labourers who often were unorganized and not geographically concentrated. As a result, the dispersed power structure went hand in hand with a loose but broad issue coalition-for specific welfare expansions-among academia, civil society, bureaucrats, and politicians irrespective of their ideology. In contrast, the concentrated power structure has seen radical turns to zero-sum political or ideological issues such as the constitutional reform in Japan or military measures toward North Korea/Mainland China in South Korea/Taiwan. This, in turn, marginalized welfare-related issues.

This dissertation explores the diverging social spending patterns in labour-abundant regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It is motivated by two main research questions: 1. Why have social spending levels and social policy trajectories writ large diverged so drastically across labour-abundant MENA regimes? 2. How can we explain the market persistence of spending levels after divergence? To answer the first question, this study develops a theory about the emergence of authoritarian welfare states. It argues that autocratic leaders need both the incentives and the abilities to distribute welfare for authoritarian welfare states to emerge. The former are shaped by coalition building dynamics at the onset of regime formation while the latter are conditioned by the external environment. At the level of incentives, broad coalitions emerge in the presence of intra-elite conflict and the absence of salient communal cleavages and, if present jointly, provide a strong incentive for welfare provision. Conversely, a cohesive elite or salient communal division entail small coalitions with few incentives to distribute welfare broadly. At the level of abilities, a strong external threat to regime survival is expected to undermine the ability to provide social welfare in broad coalitions. Facing a 'butter or guns' trade-off, elites shift priority to security expenditures and the population accepts that because no alternative regime could credibly commit to neglecting external defence in the presence of external threats. Only an abundant resource endowment can provide the necessary resources to avert this trade-off. To answer the second question, I rely on two important mechanisms in the welfare state literature to explain path dependance. The first one can broadly be summarised as 'constituency politics' in that beneficiaries of social policies succesfully avert deviations from the spending path in the form of systemic reforms or large-scale spending cuts. Mobilisation of these constituencies should be particularly vigourous if initial advantages conferred to these groups habe been reinforced over time, for instance, because these groups grew in size or got entrenched in the state administration. The second mechanisms are spill-over effects to unintended beneficiaries who can over time become important gatekeepers against path divergence. Methodologically, the study is characterised by a mixed-methods approach which combines quantitative tests with the analysis of qualitative evidence in the form of arhcival material, newspapers, and field interviews. Moreover, the study also follows a multi-level approach in that the viability of the argument is tested comparatively at the cross-country level and process-traced at the micro-level in two in-depth case studies of Tunisia and Egypt.

For the last thirty years a quiet revolution has been taking place in political theory. Starting in theology and philosophy, and making its way through history and sociology to politics, policy and practice, this disparate movement has slowly adopted the title of post-liberalism. Although difficult to encapsulate in a single argument, the central idea of post liberalism is that political theory has, over the course of the last four centuries, slowly but surely become dominated by liberalism, neglecting ideas of the good in favour of an abstract respect for plurality. This theory has apparently infiltrated politics, policy and practice, leaving these unable to inspire feelings of solidarity or collective action. The aim of this thesis is to explore these ideas both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, it places post-liberal ideas into dialogue with anthropologies and sociologies of religion, of the state, and of capitalism, with special attention to research engaged with how these categories influence ideas of the good. Empirically, it undertakes a multiple case-study ethnography of civic action groups working in London. The cases are chosen on the basis of their representing key policy paradigms for social solidarity in the post-war era: Christian, secular, multi-faith and post-secular. The thesis concludes by offering an alternative framework, in which religion sits as a subset, for developing shared ideas of the good deliberatively and inclusively, so as to not only respect but thrive on plurality.

After Gøsta Esping-Andersen published his classic thesis The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990, comparative welfare research entered a flourishing period. Compared to this, the comparative study of East Asian welfare systems has remained relatively underdeveloped. Particularly, during and after the Asian financial crisis in 1997, East Asia’s economic and social structures came under strain, and their social progress faced many challenges, which sparked new debates regarding the crisis and its social consequences. The classic Productivist Welfare Capitalism (PWC) thesis faced a fundamental challenge as part of these debates. Drawing on the PWC thesis, this thesis theoretically and empirically explored the welfare developments and reforms of East Asian states in this context. The analysis of welfare systems focuses on the debates of the distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare. As such, six key policy fields, education, health-care services, family policy, old-age pensions, housing and the protective labour market policy, of six states, China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, over the past two decades are explored by set-theoretic methods. First, employing fuzzy-set ideal type analysis (fsITA) it is argued that it is inappropriate to talk about a single, homogeneous welfare model in East Asia. East Asian states have distinctive patterns of welfare development often combining ‘productive’ and ‘protective’ welfare policies. What is more, after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, social protection became a more important aspect of welfare systems across East Asian states. Second, the reasons for the diverse developmental trajectories are examined by employing fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). Here, the findings suggest that in contrast to the PWC thesis, economic growth was not a necessary condition for welfare development in East Asia. Instead, it is argued that welfare development can occur under both weak and strong socio-economic conditions in combination with demographic conditions and the level of globalisation. This thesis thus advances current debates in the literature on East Asian welfare models and development and sets the stage for future research.

Calls for greater public participation in the policy process have become a commonplace in contemporary governance, advocated across the political spectrum. Part of what makes participation beguiling is that it can take many meanings. This thesis investigates those meanings and their implications for how to do participatory policy-making. It outlines an innovative new typology of four modes of public participation in social policy decisions. The four modes – labelled: knowledge transfer, collective decision-making, choice and voice, and arbitration and oversight – are each linked to different traditions in democratic and public administration theory. As such, they go beyond existing typologies of participation, which are either rooted in one, radical participatory, normative orientation, or abstracted from broader normative debates altogether. This typology is followed by an empirical study of the procedural preferences of 34 key informants involved with participation in health, housing, poverty, and social security policy in Britain. It combines a Q-method survey and qualitative interviews to provide a novel mix of quantitative and qualitative data on each person’s preference. The analysis demonstrates that the preferences of the majority of study participants mirror the knowledge transfer and collective decision-making modes of participation, with significant disagreements over the objectives of participation and how much power should be afforded to the public. The rich mixture of quantitative and qualitative data also enables a deeper exploration of the nature of procedural preferences than existing studies, which have primarily employed secondary data analysis of large-scale surveys. It establishes that there are not just differences between participants but deep ambivalences within participants’ preferences. The thesis then proposes a systems approach to participation in governance. It describes three functions that participation can serve in complex policy systems: effectiveness, autonomy and accountability. The four modes of participation are matched with the three functions, using examples from the English National Health Service (NHS) for further elucidation. This approach provides a framework for designing and assessing participatory policymaking that takes account of the diversity of procedural preferences.

Situated as the cornerstone of the Common European Asylum System, the EU’s Dublin system functions as the legal mechanism for determining Member State responsibility for the processing of asylum claims. Controversial from inception, it has been subject to extensive criticism that speaks not only to the distributional inequalities that it produces among the Member States, but also to its potentially detrimental impact on the human rights of asylum seekers. Despite these problems, however, the core features of the system as originally agreed in the 1990 Dublin Convention have remained remarkably resilient over the course of two reforms – one in 2003, and one in 2013. At the same time, the EU’s governance landscape as it pertains to asylum policy-making has undergone a marked transformation. While Dublin I was the product of intergovernmentalism, both Dublin II and Dublin III were negotiated as part of the EU acquis communitaire, the former following the partial communitarisation of asylum policy-making and the latter following its full communitarisation. Though the specific changes to the institutional features of policymaking that this transition has entailed have been both theoretically expected and empirically proven to have a positive effect on EU policy output, the overall stability of the Dublin system in the face of these changes leaves it unclear as to what extent the ‘promise of communitarisation’ has been delivered in this particular case. How then do we explain the perseverance of a system that has not only failed to provide adequate standards of protection to those seeking it within EU borders, but which has also continually disadvantaged some of the very Member States party to its terms? And what impact, if any, has the communitarisation of asylum policy-making had on the attempts at its reform? This research traces the evolution of the Dublin system from its initial formation through to its current state, by analysing the negotiations that produced each of the three Dublin agreements in order to explain both the system’s emergence and its on-going stability. Using a rational choice institutionalist framework, it finds that the Dublin system’s endurance can ultimately be credited to the deliberate choices that have been made by both the Member States and the EU’s supranational institutions in pursuit of their preferences (bolstered or weakened by their relative strength of position) in the context of the (either empowering or constraining) institutional settings within which the reform negotiations took place.

Very few narratives go as unchallenged about the transition of Central and Eastern European countries from state socialism to market democracies as the following: before the transitions people in these countries had strong social rights but were lacking any civic and political rights, and while the transformations provided the people with firm civil and political citizenship, they lost out on social rights. In my dissertation I argue that this is an oversimplifying and highly distorted narrative that is blind to the deep inequalities in these societies. My research focused on one particular means of reproducing these inequalities, namely welfare institutions, and explored what recipients of social assistance provision learned about their citizenship in the post-transition Hungarian welfare complex. This analysis not only demonstrated an inextricable interrelationship between civil, political and social citizenship, but also allowed for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms through which apparent political inequalities were reproduced in practice. By the innovative method of institutional ethnography I constructed a mosaic of the various component elements of the institutional system of social assistance provision in contemporary Hungary and investigated the influence that each had on recipients' civil and political citizenship. This study indicated a marked discrepancy between recipients' ideal and their lived experiences of citizenship, and found that certain characteristics of the system of social assistance provision played a crucial part in reproducing this discrepancy. The high level of discretion in the system, recipients' lack of information, the treatment they underwent in the welfare office, as well as the lack of institutional guarantees that could ensure that they enjoyed equal and fair treatment in all the welfare offices in the country proved to be the most important characteristics of social assistance provision that had direct or indirect effects on recipients' democratic subjectivity.