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This article provides a conceptual analysis of universalism, universality, and universalization in the Canadian context, important for students, activists, and practitioners of social policy for better understanding the content of debates and examining the ever-shifting balance between universal programs and other types of social provisions. Three perspectives are evident in public opinion and political discourse in social policy making: the anti-universalists, administrative universalists, and the active universalists. This article also identifies several kinds of universality: symbolic, tenuous, stalled, restrictive, and expansive. In a society of growing diversity, the relationship between the plural and the universal has led to theorizing about new notions of universalism. The social is a political space of multiple jurisdictions, governance relations, policies and citizen identities. The article argues that while retrenchment and austerity politics are present realities, the community values associated with universalism and the policy techniques linked with universality have not been abandoned. Cet article presente une analyse conceptuelle de Tuniversalisme, de l'universalite et de Tuniversalisation dans le contexte canadien. Cette analyse est importante pour les etudiants, les activistes et les praticiens de la protection sociale, pour les aider a comprendre la teneur des debats sociaux et a examiner l'equilibre toujours mouvant entre les programmes universels et d'autres types de politiques sociales. Sur le role de l'universel dans Telaboration de la protection sociale, trois perspectives sont evidentes dans Topinion publique et le discours politique : les anti-universalistes, les universalistes administratifs et les universalistes actifs. L'article identifie egalement plusieurs sortes d'universalite : symbolique, tenue, paralysee, restrictive et expansive. Dans une societe de plus en plus diverse, la relation entre la pluralite et l'universel est devenue l'objet theorique de nouvelles notions de Tuniversalisme. Le social est un espace politique aux multiples competences, relations de gouvernance, politiques publiques et identites citoyennes. L'article suggere que meme si les politiques d'austerite et de repli sont des realites contemporaines, les valeurs communautaires associees a Tuniversalisme et aux techniques de politique publique liees a l'universalite n'ont pas ete abandonnees., Introduction The purpose of this article is to offer a conceptual structure for mapping and examining the ideas and practices of the universal in social policy. The aim is to [...]

Canada's welfare state is lopsided: while leading the world in some areas of social investment--most notably health care and higher education--it is a laggard in other areas of social welfare spending, including childcare policies. We find that policy resistance to universal childcare in most regions of Canada today has deep historical roots and is, indeed, embedded into the very framework of the Canadian welfare state: the social citizenship contract. We employ a 'bottom-up' perspective on the welfare state focusing on how collective actors, in particular, first-wave feminists and their contemporaries within labor movement organizations, framed and characterized female social citizenship in ways that excluded employed women from full membership and, in this, truncated discursive opportunities by which claims for universal welfare state provisions could be made. L'Etat providence Canadien est desequilibre: leader mondial dans certains domaines de l'investissement social--plus particulierement en soins de sante et enseignement superieur il traine dans d'autres domaines de la depense d'aide sociale, y compris les politiques de garde d'enfants. Nous constatons qu'aujourd'hui la resistance dans la plupart des regions du Canada a la politique de garde d'enfants universel a des racines historiques profondes. Elle est de fait integre dans le cadre meme du bien-etre social canadien: le contrat de citoyennete sociale. Nous employons une approche de 'bas en haut' sur l'etat du bien-etre en nous concentrant sur la facon dont les acteurs collectifs, en particulier, les feministes de la premiere vague et leurs contemporains au sein des organisations du mouvement ouvrier, ont encadrees et caracterise la citoyennete sociale feminine; Nous constatons que l'exclusion de l'adhesion des femmes employees tronque les possibilites discursives par lesquelles des revendications pour des provisions universelles de bien-etre sociale pourraient etre apportees., INTRODUCTION CANADA'S WELFARE STATE is lopsided: while leading the world in some areas of social investment--most notably health care and higher education (OECD 2009)--it is a laggard in many other [...]

Byline: Kyo-seong Kim (1), Yongwoo Lee (2), Yu-jeong Lee (3) Keywords: Poverty; Income-maintenance policy; Public social expenditure; Hierarchical linear model (HLM); Hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM) Abstract: This study aims to investigate factors contributing to poverty, one of the most significant social problems in Western societies. To this end, 13 countries that have made a variety of efforts to reduce poverty, and therefore experienced similar development processes related to welfare, were selected. To overcome the methodological limitations of previous studies, the study utilized a Hierarchical Generalized Linear Model to simultaneously analyze individual-level and state-level factors that might affect the poverty status of a household, employing household data from the fifth wave of Luxembourg Income Study and Comparative Welfare State data. By comparing the magnitude of individual- and state-level effects in the analysis process, the model can empirically illuminate which of the two levels is more responsible for households' destitution. Furthermore, by analyzing the level of and characteristics of poverty in each country, this study examines whether there are discrepancies in the level of poverty across types of welfare states and what factors contribute to these discrepancies. Author Affiliation: (1) Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea (2) Konkuk University, Chungju, Korea (3) Seoul Welfare Foundation, Seoul, Korea Article History: Registration Date: 01/03/2010 Accepted Date: 01/03/2010 Online Date: 13/03/2010

The relationship between political decentralisation and the welfare state is much studied, and large-scale studies have repeatedly found that decentralised states have less generous welfare states. How do we fit that with other studies that emphasise the potential of decentralisation to raise welfare standards.? This article argues that decentralisation, as a variable, is too broad and it is more efficient to focus on the structure of veto players in the central state, intergovernmental relations and intergovernmental finance. Those are the actual mechanisms that connect decentralisation to the welfare states, and they can all vary independently of decentralisation. It uses recent changes in the United States and United Kingdom as examples. The fragmentation and average weakness of the US welfare state is mostly due to a federal government riddled with internal veto points that permits considerable interstate variation and low overall average provision, while tight central control on finances in the UK means that most variation is in the organisation, rather than levels, of social services. doi: 10.1017/S0047279409990407

A study was conducted to examine how the core precepts of community partnership are indicative of wider changes that have been taking place in the form and function of the British welfare state. The possibilities for developing and sustaining alternative forms of collaborative practice are also analyzed.

The first half of this article explains the enduring disparities in inequality and welfare states across advanced economies in terms of varieties of capitalism and political systems. Where capitalism is coordinated, as in much of northern Europe, political systems are consensus-based with proportional representation (PR); consensus politics and coordinated capitalism reinforce each other in generating relatively low inequality and strong welfare states. Where capitalism is liberal - the Anglo-Saxon countries--political systems are competitive with majoritarian voting: mutual reinforcement of politics and capitalism generates relatively inegalitarian outcomes and safety-net welfare states. The second half of the article develops a model of hierarchical capitalism to show how this reinforces and is reinforced by a Latin American political system with majoritarian presidents and PR legislatures to generate high and persistent inequality and reduce development options. Keywords: inequality; electoral system; varieties of capitalism; Latin America; diversified business groups; multinational corporations (MNCs); skills.

In contrast to the study of outcomes such as social spending, systematic comparative analysis of political processes underlying welfare state change is scarce. This study deals with the influence of government parties and second chambers as veto players in social entitlement legislation. It asks three questions regarding the duration and outcome of the legislative process at the parliamentary stage. Does the number of government parties or the ideological distance between them affect the passage of bills? Under which circumstances do second chambers have an influence? Does the ideological position of the leftmost governing party affect the speed of passage of bills in policy areas where there is pressure for retrenchment? The hypotheses are tested using an original dataset on social entitlement bills initiated in Belgium, Germany and the UK between 1987/88 and 2002/03. Event history analysis at the level of individual bills yields the following results: proposals initiated from among the government parties on the floor are delayed by a higher number of parties in government, by greater ideological distance between them, if the second chamber is controlled by the opposition and its approval is mandatory, if the left veto player is more rightwing and if the bills deal with expansionary or mixed policies. Cabinet bills, in contrast, are not affected by any of these factors. The results point to a number of further research questions and show that quantitative studies in comparative welfare state research can go beyond testing simple hypotheses with macro-level outcome data.

A study was conducted to investigate the relationship between several political mechanisms and the variation in unemployment compensation programs. It is argued that the choice of unemployment compensation programs depend on the level of franchise extension. Findings show that franchise extension had the greatest influence on the likelihood of instituting unemployment compensation, while controlling socio-economic factors.

Several recent studies have focused attention on the relationship between welfare states and poverty, looking primarily at relative poverty and employing concepts of welfare state generosity that are problematic. This has made it difficult to evaluate claims that equality has come at the expense of economic growth. In this article, the authors examine more directly the relationship between welfare state generosity in three social insurance programs--unemployment, sickness, and pensions--and poverty levels in advanced industrial democracies in the past quarter of the 20th century. The results strongly suggest that more generous entitlements to key social insurance programs are associated not only with lower relative poverty but also with lower absolute poverty. This supports the contention that promoting relative economic equality can improve the absolute material well-being of the poor. However, no evidence suggests that relatively more generous unemployment benefits systematically reduce poverty. Keywords: welfare state; poverty; inequality; comparative political economy

It is increasingly impossible to understand and explain the shape and delivery of contemporary social policy unless we consider the role of business. Several factors have been at work here. First, many of the changes in social policy introduced since the 1970s have been in response either to business demands or more general concerns about national competitiveness and the needs of business. Second, globalisation has increased corporate power within states, leading to transformations in social and fiscal policies. Third, business has been incorporated into the management of many areas of the welfare state by governments keen to control expenditure and introduce private sector values into services. Fourth, welfare services, from hospitals to schools, have been increasingly opened up to private markets. Despite all this, the issues of business influence and involvement in social policy has been neglected in the literature. This article seeks to place corporate power and influence centre-stage by outlining and critically reflecting on the place of business within contemporary welfare states, with a particular focus on the UK. Business, it argues, is increasingly important to welfare outcomes and needs to be taken into account more fully within the social policy literature.

This article examines whether the different welfare states of the European Union member states engender different policy preferences and attitudes among the population. More specifically, it investigates variations in attitudes towards population ageing and pension reforms, and variations in people's retirement age preferences and expectations. It is shown that despite the different cultures and welfare traditions in the old and new member states, there are commonalities in people's value orientations and views about population ageing, not least that the vast majority are pessimistic about the consequences. In both Eastern and Western Europe, the most popular options for pensions reform are to raise taxes and to extend working life, and few favour reducing pension benefits. Despite these similarities, there are also marked attitudinal differences. Eastern Europeans rely more on their children for old-age care and are much more in favour of a pension structure in which benefits depend on the number of children. On personal expectations and preferences for retirement, it is shown that both Eastern and Western Europeans expect to retire from the labour market at an older age than the current actual retirement age. KEY WORDS--pension, retirement, ageing, welfare state, attitudes, population policy.

Many scholars have characterized the United States as a welfare state 'laggard,' less generous than most other nations because of a peculiarly American set of historical circumstances and values. This article explores 'American exceptionalism' in the context of welfare state reforms over the past two decades. The authors first describe recent social policy innovations in Western democracies, considering two competing views of welfare state change. The first asserts that welfare states have been fundamentally transformed into 'enabling' states, characterized by efforts to promote work, privatize benefits and services, and target benefits to the most needy. The second holds that policy structures have remained essentially intact because of 'path-dependent' processes that create institutional continuity. Although evidence for the United States is somewhat mixed, the general direction of policy decisions and current frameworks of policy debates is consistent with a transition toward an enabling state. Keywords: welfare state; Social Security; Medicare

Who gets what from government is partly determined by who applies for government programs. Despite the importance of the claiming process, political scientists have said little about the factors that influence citizen demands on government programs. We explore the hypothesis that state environments systematically shape aggregate rates of welfare demand making by testing a model of welfare claiming in the Social Security Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs. Our findings show that in addition to economic need for benefits, the density of civil society organizations, the political ideology of state officials, and the generosity of state-run public assistance programs shape the amount and direction of citizen demands on the welfare system. Although commonalities exist in which variables explain welfare claiming, relationships vary in interesting ways across programs and stages of the claiming process, highlighting the need for a theoretical model of claiming behavior that takes into account such differences.

This study examined belief in personal control among low-income single mothers (African American, Puerto Rican, and European American) in an economically distressed region in the Northeast, who were recruited from child care centers and community programs. A factor analysis of the Belief in Personal Control Scale supported the three hypothesized subscales of the measure--God-mediated control, external control, and exaggerated personal control. The results indicate that African American women had stronger God-mediated control and weaker external control than did European American women and that Puerto Rican women had greater external control and weaker exaggerated personal control than did European American women. They suggest that an instrument that measures belief in personal control can contribute to efforts to understand low-income single mothers' perceptions of their situations and that religious faith should be further explored as a key component of belief in personal control. Keywords: belief in personal control; empowerment; low-income single mothers; religious faith

The effect of traditional left-right economic preferences on countries' international financial openness is more subtle than existing studies have recognized. The authors investigate the role that partisan politics played in the liberalization of international financial markets within 12 Western European democracies from 1960 to 1986. The authors find that right governments tended to be active liberalizers of the capital account. They were more likely than left governments to enact liberalizations, and liberalizations were especially likely when new right governments entered office. Left governments typically acquiesced to these changes. Although less likely to enact liberalizations, they were no more likely to impose new restrictions. The authors' findings are consistent with studies that show how financial integration does not undermine welfare states but is still subject to partisan contention. Keywords: partisanship; capital controls; financial liberalization; Western Europe; welfare state

Welfare-to-work programmes promoting employment of people with a disability or chronic illness are an expanding aspect of welfare reform in the UK. What evidence is there of impact on employment outcomes? This paper presents a systematic review of the evidence on UK policy initiatives. Both quantitative and qualitative studies were identified: 5399 abstracts were located, from which 16 studies were critically appraised. Overall, each of the five main welfare-to-work strategies operating in the 1990s helped people with disabilities into work, who were previously on benefits. The proportion of participants gaining employment after involvement ranged from 11% to 50%, dependent on characteristics of participants, such as 'job-readiness', as well as wider labour market context. As most studies were uncontrolled, it was difficult to determine if the improved employment chances were due to the effectiveness of the welfare-to-work interventions themselves or to external factors. Wider impact, such as uptake of schemes as a proportion of the total target population, was weak. The qualitative components identified barriers and facilitators concerned with effective implementation, to aid design of future initiatives. Keywords: Systematic review; Disability; Chronic illness; Employment; Welfare reform; UK

Economics is commonly defined in terms of the relationship between people's unlimited wants and society's scarce resources. The definition implies a central role for an understanding of what people want, i.e. their objectives. This, in turn, suggests an important role for both empirical research into people's objectives and debate about the acceptability of the objectives. In contrast with this expectation, economics has avoided these issues by the adoption of an orthodoxy that imposes objectives. However evidence suggests, at least in the health sector, that people do not have the simple objectives assumed by economic theory. Amartya Sen has advocated a shift from a focus on 'utility' to a focus on 'capabilities' and 'functionings' as a way of overcoming the shortcomings of welfarism. However, the practicality of Sen's account is threatened by the range of possible 'functionings', by the lack of guidance about how they should be weighted, and by suspicions that they do not capture the full range of objectives people appear to value. We argue that 'empirical ethics', an emerging approach in the health sector, provides important lessons on overcoming these problems. Moreover, it is an ethically defensible methodology, and yields practical results that can assist policy makers in the allocation of resources. Keywords: Welfarism; Extra-welfarism; Social preferences; Empirical ethics

Largely absent in the congressional debate regarding U.S. welfare reform reauthorization are policy discussions aimed at preventing long-term welfare use for families at risk, This study examines three social science perspectives explaining the relationship between early poverty and health as a means to understand long-term welfare receipt. Using longitudinal data collected for more than 30 years from a cohort of African Americans living in inner-city Chicago, we examined whether a social causation, health selection, or bio-social perspective best characterized the route to longterm welfare receipt. Results indicated that a bio-social perspective provided the best explanation for how early life course factors relate to long-term welfare use later in adulthood. Thus, this theory merits further study as an explanation for the relationship between health status and income. These findings point to the vulnerability of those who are both poor and in ill health, and should direct our policies regarding how to best prevent long term welfare receipt in future generations. Keywords: Long-term welfare receipt; Health; Poverty; Social causation; Health selection; Bio-social

Abstract This article briefly explores the comparative ways in which the Australian and Norwegian welfare system supports women and children escaping violence, when they are seeking to become established independently. [...]

This article puts into question the taken-for-granted view that immigrant entrepreneurship is a fast track towards integration in civil society. It does so by examining income and disposable income for immigrant entrepreneurs in Sweden in relation to immigrants that are not entrepreneurs. Data is drawn from the LOUISE database, which is a longitudinal register database covering all individuals above 16 years of age living in Sweden and includes income variables, age, sex, education, employment status and so on. It is shown that immigrant entrepreneurs have substantially lower incomes than employed immigrants and only marginally higher levels of disposable incomes compared to the unemployed when other background variables are held constant. The relationship between the two groups did not change between 1992 and 1998 suggesting that, contrary to what was expected, differences in the state of the economy are not decisive in explaining income differences between the different groups of immigrants. It is suggested that entrepreneurship for immigrants may or may not be positive for the individual, but it is clear that it is not a successful way to fight economic marginalization and segregation. It puts into question the effectiveness of the whole social democratic welfare state when it comes to integrating immigrants into society. KEY WORDS ethnic entrepreneurship / immigrant entrepreneurship / income / Sweden

In a previous paper in this journal (Headey et al., 2000) a comparison was made between three so-called 'best cases' of welfare regime types, the 'Liberal' US, 'the 'Corporatist' Germany and the 'Social-Democratic' Netherlands. The main conclusion was that the Social-Democratic welfare state performed best on nearly all social and economic indicators that were applied. That paper was based on the ten-year datasets drawn from the national socio-economic panel studies. For this paper we use the unique comparative panel dataset of the European Community Household Panel. At the time of research, only three waves of data covering the 1994-96 period were available. Instead of three countries representing three different welfare state types as in the earlier paper we cover twelve countries allowing us to distinguish a fourth Southern or Mediterranean welfare regime type and to compare the performance of the four regimes. Compared to the Headey's et al. paper we focus on the comparative analysis of the level of deprivation and pay less attention to income poverty and inequality. Because we consider deprivation to be part of the concept of social exclusion (see also Atkinson et al., 2002) our results also provide evidence on how welfare regimes across the EU cope with social exclusion. We conclude that the Social-Democratic welfare state does a good job of preventing income poverty but performs less well in equalising levels of deprivation. Our results also show that the immature Southern welfare states perform worse with respect to preventing deprivation. Trying to explain levels of deprivation by estimating Tobit panel regressions it turned out that the impact of regime type remains significant though limited. Common, 'structural' disparities between the countries and regimes in terms of economic welfare, the demographic structure, and the employment situation explain most of the variance across countries.

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that elderly, child, and overall poverty are divergent. Comparing the official U.S. measure with the Luxembourg Income Study's (LIS) measure, the author shows that the official measure underestimates elderly poverty by a significant amount and child poverty by a lesser amount. Both the elderly and children are much more likely to be poor than the overall population. Analyses of 18 rich Western democracies show that overall and child poverty are very strongly positively correlated, whereas elderly poverty is moderately correlated with those two. Multivariate analyses show some commonalities and some differences in the sources of these three. Two measures of the welfare state significantly reduce overall, elderly, and child poverty. Whereas female labor force participation reduces all three, manufacturing employment, economic performance, and demographic variables only influence one or two of the dependent variables. Keywords: poverty; elderly; children; welfare state

The current study explores the impact of parental welfare history on individuals' current use of welfare by decomposing intergenerational differences using techniques traditionally employed in the race and sex wage discrimination literature. This research extends Rank and Cheng's examination of welfare across generations by including various attitudinal, cultural, and community factors. Empirical testing of the theoretical explanations of welfare use--cultural and structural models--found mixed support. Utilizing data from the National Survey of Households and Families, logistic regression and decomposition analysis shows that family endowments and resources, but not family culture, determine welfare use. Differences in education, socioeconomic status, attitudes, and community resources appear to sufficiently explain the influence of intergenerational welfare use. The article concludes with implications of welfare reform in light of the theoretical models and the current study findings. Keywords: welfare; human capital; intergenerational; poverty; cultural model

This analysis utilizes longitudinal survey and administrative data on 1998 welfare recipients in Illinois to assess whether different types of grant reductions are associated with subsequent work, welfare receipt, and hardships. Results show that imposed sanctions are inversely associated with formal work and earnings, as well as with increases in informal work, other work activities, and food hardships. Threats to sanction are unassociated with formal work and welfare outcomes but positively associated with informal work, other work activities, and rent hardship. Greater knowledge of welfare rules is associated with more formal work, less welfare receipt, and less hardship.

Applied welfare analysis is commonly based on mean or median benefit estimates. However, the whole conditional distribution of benefits is often of interest for policy makers. This article compares the [...]

In his book The Ends and Means of Welfare, Australian economist Peter Saunders attempts to move from a 'welfare sociology' to a 'sociology of the welfare state' (or, more precisely, [...]

Abstract A sample of Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) recipients identified a number of issues preventing them from obtaining paid employment. This paper focuses on one of these issues, their children's [...]

We develop an approach for estimating individual or household level preferences for a large set of quality-differentiated goods and for constructing Hicksian welfare measures within the demand system framework. Our [...]

Social scientists have documented more negative reactions to the concept of welfare versus the concept of poor, despite the fact that both labels can be used almost interchangeably in current political discussions. We believe that the most proximal explanation rests in the different attributional information contained within the stereotypes of welfare recipients versus poor people. Three studies were conducted to test this idea. The results suggest that the attributional content within stereotypes of welfare recipients, particularly their greater responsibility for their impoverished state compared with poor people, most influences the public's more negative reaction to welfare. The results are discussed in terms of how the rhetoric of stereotypes may be exploited in the political domain.

Recent work in comparative political economy has emphasized the existence of functional equivalents to the welfare state in the area of labor market policy. In many European countries, in Australia, and in New Zealand, labor laws, minimum wages, and collective agreements have traditionally played an important role in guaranteeing a certain level of economic security for workers and their families. This article tries to explain why different countries have developed different instruments for providing economic security to wage earners. It compares labor legislation and practices across several European countries and focuses on the detailed trajectory of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It finds that state-society relationships and ideological influences at key historical moments can help understand the original divergence, which is perpetuated through a typical path-dependent development. Keywords: labor market policy; employment protection; social policy; welfare state; path dependency

Three specialists in social services present an assessment of Hungary's performance during the economic transition from the perspective of social policy and the general welfare of the population. Using figures drawn from a variety of European sources, they offer a review of social expenditure, labor market tendencies, and the social security, health and education systems, comparing throughout with data from the Czech Republic, Poland and the European Union.

China has a long tradition of Confucianism, it has also been dominated by a communist ideology for a few decades. How did these different beliefs and principles influence its welfare system in the past? Towards which direction is the system shifting when the balance of power between the state (the dominant ideology) and society (with its own traditions) has been changed? This article analyses the case of 'Foster Mother Villages' and the Datong Social Welfare Institution. The case of Datong shows that, although the influence of official communist ideology was dominant in the overall system of child protection in China, traditional factors were also influential. The dominant role of official ideology has to be underpinned by financial support from the state. Where the government failed to provide the support, the traditional factor became dominant in the main institutional arrangements: that is the reason why institutional care failed to replace foster care in Datong city. In the past 50 years, spanning the eras of both planned economy and market reform in China, the Datong Social Welfare Institution has protected more than 6,500 orphaned, lost and abandoned children, and most of these children have finally achieved a normal family life.

Voter sentiment about unemployed immigrants receiving subsidies varies depending on the reasons for unemployment.

Employment and welfare outcomes are investigated for women who received both welfare and substance abuse treatment in Florida from 1994 to 1999. By linking information from three statewide administrative databases, we identify 4,236 women who meet both criteria. Over the study period, there was a significant increase in the proportion of women moving from welfare to work. Predictors of posttreatment employment include demographic characteristics, treatment-related characteristics, and working during the month of admission. Both completion of treatment and length of time in treatment are associated with employment.

Questions concerning what it means to be a human agent and the capacities of those who receive welfare services to reflect upon and shape their lives, and the kinds of social conditions which create opportunities for such 'reflexivity', have begun to move to the centre of social policy and social work analysis. Using empirical evidence drawn from a study of child and woman protection, this paper argues that, contrary to claims that the concept of self-reflexivity as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens is of little relevance to marginalised citizens, in late-modernity the socially excluded are using social work and welfare services in creative ways to critically engage in life-planning, to find safety and healing. However, the data suggest that much greater specificity is needed in relation to the areas in which it is possible to act to change and develop the self and the social world in late-modernity. The paper argues for a complex theory of agency and reflexivity in welfare discourse which takes account of the intersection of structural disadvantage, intervention practices and personal biography and how people adjust to adversity and cope with toxic experiences and relationships in their lives. This helps to account for the limits to the capacities of agents to reflect and know why they act as they do and their capacities to act destructively, as well as providing for an appreciation of the creative, reflexive welfare subject.

An analysis of a theory formulated to the dynamics of income redistribution where policy is set through repeated voting by forward-looking rational agents and current policy affects future political outcomes through changes in the distribution of voters. The theory provides insights on salient aspects such as, it predicts that welfare state policies and their effects on distribution are persistent, and it suggests that welfare state institutions are intrinsically fragile, since even political majorities benefiting from redistribution may want to strategically vote for policies leading to the dismantlement of the welfare state.

In the emergent literature of social policy transfer, very considerable attention has been directed to the processes of policy exchange between North America and the UK. This paper reports the [...]

This article assesses whether it is possible to reconceptualize the traditional research approaches to the relationship between poverty and the life cycle on the basis of different sociological perspectives on the life course found in the literature. While the family-cycle approach, which was originally formulated by Seebohm Rowntree (1902), is criticized for being static, descriptive, normative and inflexible, dynamic poverty research is mostly confined to the quantitative analysis of income trajectories, and thus offers only a partial solution to our problem. However, the life-course perspective allows us to combine the best elements of these traditional approaches and to reconceptualize them into a general framework for the study of social exclusion and poverty. To this end, three sociological perspectives on the life course are considered: the traditional North-American life-course perspective formulated by Elder (1974), the Continental institutional approach, and a combined approach which we label the `political economy of the life course'. Drawing from these three perspectives, we propose a general framework of analysis and formulate hypotheses regarding the phenomena of social exclusion and poverty over the life course which can subsequently be empirically validated. KEYWORDS: Social exclusion; poverty; life course; longitudinal analysis; de-institutionalization; welfare state

The American paradigm of propertied citizenship has far-reaching consequences for the propertyless, as in the brutal criminalization of the homeless. Activist groups, such as the anarchist squatter organization Homes Not Jails, have sought to challenge this paradigm through innovative techniques of property takeovers, invocations of American traditions of homesteading, and Third World tactics of self-help and informality. This study trains a transnational lens on both the paradigm and its subversions. Posing Third World questions of the First World, the author seeks to unsettle the normalized hierarchy of development and underdevelopment and explores lessons that can be learned from different modes of shelter struggles. Keywords: homelessness; housing; citizenship; transnational; welfare state

The circumstances which favoured the expansion of state welfare in the post-war `golden age'--secure growth, full employment, moderate welfare needs and national politico-economic autonomy--have been reversed in the `silver age' of labour market restructuring, demographic transition and economic globalisation. Most researchers argue that the European welfare settlement is (so far) surprisingly resilient in the face of current challenges. This article argues that analysis of welfare states has been approached from two basic directions--quantitative analysis and comparative case study--and that each approach has its merits and difficulties. Using the example of pensions policy it show that quantitative methods tend to produce findings which place greater emphasis on continuity and resilience, while case studies focus attention more on political processes. The latter approach is likely to provide greater insight into shifts that may lead to new policy directions in the immediate future. The picture presented by the quantitative method tends to predominate in comparative cross-national studies of the response of welfare states to current pressures, and this may overemphasise stability and resilience against discontinuity and change.

Rebuilding of the welfare state in post-industrialized societies is no longer organized around the male worker but around the parent-producer figure. This shift in the focus of social policies results in a greater mix between employment policies and policies towards families and children. In Quebec, this change appears as a fundamental one; the core of social public action is redefined by federal and provincial governments. By comparison, in France the fight against unemployment is still dominant.

The author discusses the philosophy of legal historian F. W. Maitland in order to demonstrate his conception of the state as a corporation. Topics include personal property, state lending, public debt, the welfare state, and welfare reform.

This article responds to the view that it is now time to move on from debates about post-Fordism and the new sociology of welfare. It argues that it is important to retain the traditional agenda of social welfare (redistributive state policies designed to promote social integration and challenge the outcomes of the market) at a time when an influential position in sociology is playing down the significance of structural factors as an obstacle to progress in welfare.

R. Alapuro, T. Lindbekk and P. Sulkunen made favorable comments regarding the origins of modern Scandinavian welfare states. For instance, Alapuro says that the Lutheran merger of state, civil society and the church is behind the culture of obedience in Nordic countries. On the other hand, P. Baldwin, P. Gundelach and J. Stephens wrote critical commentaries. Baldwin was critical for excluding Scandinavia, northern Europe and what he calls 'the Protestant welfare state.' Stephens complained about not having dealt with welfare states but with a minor social assistance program.

The changes in the labor-force participation rate (LFPR) of older males in the US from 1880 to 1940 were considered to explain how progress in public welfare programs influenced the decline in the LFPR of older males up to the 1990s. The LFPR of older males over 65 years of age has been significantly declining since the 1940s with only 15% of males in the group working in 1998. The LFPR of older males declined even before the introduction of public welfare projects despite the fact that higher retirement incomes should entice more older males to retire earlier.