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This article explores notions of interpersonal dependence and personal independence voiced by university students, graduates, and staff in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It discusses how those obtaining a university education to become regular wage earners reflect on navigating the financial requests of less privileged kin. Wage earners often ascribe dependence to these kin and former sponsors who subsequently may rely on them in times of need. As the number of putatively dependent kin are often large, the process of social stratification that university-educated wage earners experience also gives rise to reflections about social welfare systems that underlie or could potentially alleviate specific constellations of perceived dependence. Ascriptions of dependence as discussed in this article highlight the combination of the dynamic circumstances of ongoing social stratification and nation-making with increased levels of connectivity through transport and mobile phone infrastructure, leading an emerging middle class to reconsider some of their social connections. Keywords: dependence, kin relations, social stratification, welfare systems, university students. Papua New Guinea., INTRODUCTION In Papua New Guinea (PNG), emic notions of dependence and independence constitute a popular pair of antonyms. They are invoked in relation to a range of contexts and varying [...]

This essay argues that several ongoing and future developments are likely to undermine the broad public support welfare states historically and currently enjoy. These developments—skill-biased technological change, privatization of pensions, higher rates of assortative mating, and the information revolution—can be expected to increase risk inequality, the predictability of risk, income and wealth inequality, and the overlap between income and risk. As a result, a plausible prediction is that intense polarization about social policy programs will replace their current broad appeal, pitting an increasing share of people with no jobs or poor jobs and little upward mobility against an increasing share of people with few incentives to support mandatory risk pooling because they can self-insure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between pro-retrenchment politicians and segments of the media, exaggerated claims about the generous benefits enjoyed by those on welfare are relatively common. But to what extent, and under what conditions, can they actually shape attitudes towards welfare? This study explores these questions via a survey experiment conducted in the UK, examining: (1) the extent to which the value of the claimed figure matters; (2) if the presence of anchoring information about minimum wage income has an impact; and (3) whether these effects differ based on egalitarianism and political knowledge. Results suggest that increasing the size of the claimed figure decreases support in a broadly linear fashion, with anchoring information important only when (asserted) benefit levels are modestly above the minimum wage income. Egalitarianism, in turn, primarily matters when especially low figures are placed alongside information about minimum wage, while low-knowledge respondents were more susceptible to anchoring effects than high-knowledge ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article aims to answer the following research questions: (a) How far do European welfare states differ in the use of the policy concept of the active social citizen? and (b) How far is it possible to explain the differences with welfare regime types and welfare culture? The article distinguishes between two different types of the policy concept of active social citizenship with regard to self-responsibility. It argues that the active social citizen's self-responsibility could be underpinned either by a major role of the welfare state, which promotes the citizens' self-determination, or by a minor role of the state, which forces citizens to be self-reliant for funding and for organizing their own social security and services. The article is based on a cross-national comparative study for two policy fields (unemployment and long-term care policies for older people) in three welfare states (Denmark, England, and Germany), and analyzes legal frameworks, data from MISSOC (Mutual Information System on Social Protection) and secondary literature. The comparative analysis shows that countries differ in the type of the policy concept of active social citizenship they use. Differences in the type of welfare regime and also differences in the welfare culture contribute to an explanation of these differences. The article is innovative in that it offers a systematic analysis of the differences in the ways in which welfare states of different regime types conceptualize "active social citizenship" with regard to the citizens' self-responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safe and just space framework devised by Raworth calls for the world's nations to achieve key minimum thresholds in social welfare while remaining within planetary boundaries. Using data on social and biophysical indicators provided by O'Neill et al., this paper argues that it is theoretically possible to achieve a good life for all within planetary boundaries in poor nations by building on existing exemplary models and by adopting fairer distributive policies. However, the additional biophysical pressure that this entails at a global level requires that rich nations dramatically reduce their biophysical footprints by 40-50%. Extant empirical studies suggest that this degree of reduction is unlikely to be achieved solely through efforts to decouple GDP growth from environmental impact, even under highly optimistic conditions. Therefore, for rich nations to fit within the boundaries of the safe and just space will require that they abandon growth as a policy objective and shift to post-capitalist economic models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This paper describes the historical development and profile of Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC) applicants, intended for poor elderly and people with disabilities, which, since 2009, uses eligibility criteria based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) of the WHO and is aligned with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The behavior of benefits was determined from the analysis the coefficients of the general and non-judicial grants between 1998 and 2014. The profile was established for the years 2010 and 2014 according to situation of acceptance, age, gender and ICF components. The average annual growth of the coefficient was higher from 2000 to 2010, prior to the adoption of the biopsychosocial eligibility model and the coefficient of non-judicial grants increased until 2010, falling thereafter. The deferrals acceptance /rejections ratio was higher among children and among those facing severe or total environmental barriers, limitations, constraints and bodily changes. The implementation of the biopsychosocial evaluation model did not cause an increased rate of grants and results evidence the need for flexibility in the eligibility criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do attitudes towards the welfare state change in response to economic crises? Addressing this question is sometimes difficult because of the lack of longitudinal data. This article deals with this empirical challenge using survey data from the 2008 European Social Survey and from our own follow-up survey of Spring 2013 to track welfare attitudes at the brink and at the peak of the socio-economic crisis in one of the hardest hit countries: Portugal. The literature on social policy preferences predicts an increased polarisation in opinions towards the welfare state between different groups within society - in particular between labour market insiders and outsiders. However, the prediction has scarcely been tested empirically. A notoriously dualised country, Portugal provides a critical setting in which to test this hypothesis. The results show attitudinal change, and this varies according to labour market vulnerability. However, we observe no polarisation and advance alternative explanations for why this is so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to re-examine from a multidimensional perspective the possible existence of a single path that could have conditioned the degree of welfare state development ( WSD) in Latin America. Economic/industrial development, trade-openness, democracy and the strength of leftist parties-labour movement are used as explanatory variables in the qualitative comparative analysis. In contrast to previous findings, this paper shows that there is no evidence of a common path followed by countries with a relatively high/medium WSD. Nevertheless, countries that experienced a low economic/industrial development combined with a low democratic experience were conditioned to have low WSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Donald J. Trump's unexpected victory in the 2016 presidential election cast a long shadow over the American welfare state. With continued Republican control of the House and Senate, Trump's occupancy of the Oval Office removed a critical constraint on Republican efforts to dismantle key Democratic social policy achievements--both old and new. Despite the absence of these important institutional veto-points, the policies that were first identified and targeted by Republicans during the Trump era have proved to be more robust than many observers and policymakers initially believed. By applying the theoretical insights and methodological tools of American Political Development, this article explores how long-running policy processes have altered the political landscape in often underappreciated ways to narrow the prospects for large-scale policy reform. More specifically, this article examines the political dynamics of Medicare and the Affordable Care Act in the early days of the Trump administration. The pressures exerted on both programs by an unpredictable president and unified Republican control of Congress provides a unique opportunity to differentiate between and assess the prospects for policy sustainability and policy stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coordinated welfare capitalism has been subject to comprehensive change since the 1990s, with workfare measures and the deregulation of employment protection at the heart of labor market reforms. Developments in Sweden, Germany, and South Korea challenge not only the assumption of relative stability that is commonly associated with the study of coordinated market economies, but also the assertion that this stability is associated with the persistence of established political coalitions. The authors contend that a collapse of longstanding welfare state coalitions is the key political driver of labor market reform, with the withdrawal of employers from previous welfare settlements at the center of this development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conception of citizenship popularised by Thomas Marshall includes a social element, in terms of which citizens are taxpayer-beneficiaries of the Welfare State. In the context of the neoliberal dismantling of the Welfare State, social citizenship has been greatly reduced in status. Today, citizens may be conceived simply as consumers of the goods and services supplied directly or indirectly by the State. Merging and developing traditional ideas of citizenship and consumerism, the European Union has promoted the image of the citizenconsumer. Citizen-consumers are expected to actively protect their own interests but also to be alert to the sustainability of the community and the environment, and to be altruistic. This exploratory article considers how this emerging model of citizenship might apply to taxpayers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

So far, studies of Swedish 20th-century social policy have emphasized the differences between the voluntary aid common around 1900 and the solidarity of welfare policy at mid-century. Means tests have been described as central instruments in the voluntary social work, while the welfare state was built on general principles of care. The question is, however, if the differences between the earlier and later forms of social policy can be characterized in such simple terms. A comparison has been made of departure points found in the social policies of the two periods. The results confirm that a significantly new way of thinking had taken shape in the years around the Second World War, but the study also shows that that the ideas concerning the welfare state contain threads that can be traced back to the scientific philanthropy of a few years earlier. The idea of social engineering was nothing new, and the idea that rights could be exchanged for duties had still not been deserted in the 1940s. In conclusion it can be said that the welfare state and the welfare politics of solidarity in several respects were built upon the principles of care that were formulated in about 1900. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The UK welfare state is under attack from harsh spending cuts, focused particularly on women, children, low-paid people and claimers of working age, and a restructuring programme. This paper examines why it is hard to make a case for generous state welfare that is both inclusive and electorally attractive. It discusses the way the issues are understood, the trilemma that pro-welfare policy-making faces, proposals for new directions in policy and a reform programme that might help build a more inclusive welfare discourse. A more inclusive society requires policies that reframe the way people think about work, reward and welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

This article explores some of the tensions at the interface of nationalist and global orientations in ideals of global mindedness and global citizenship looking specifically at the Finnish context. We engage with discussions related to the social–political and historical context of national identity in Finland and outline the conceptual framework of an educational initiative related to the development of global mindedness through experiences of international mobility and partnerships. This conceptual outline presents a set of theoretical distinctions through which we seek to challenge humanist and universalist approaches to the question of (the formation of) global mindedness by arguing that the issue is neither about cognition or understanding nor about empathy and relationships but ultimately has to do with modes of existence and exposure. Similar to discussions in other small states, the historical trajectory in Finland illustrates how the encounter between the nation and the globe poses particular challenges for education as it runs the risk of reverting to ethnocentric rather than globally minded forms of national identity building. We argue that this risk cannot be addressed with the promotion of a mere understanding of or mere empathy for the other as an educational or political antidote but rather requires an existential approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, although aggregate spending is higher than ever, there have been redistributions away from non-elderly and nondisabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs; from non-elderly, nondisabled single-parent families to married-parent families; and from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect long-standing, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of solidarity and its proper position in the legal frames, with particular focus on health care. Solidarity is often identified with welfare arrangements and social guarantees. In this institutional version, it tends to humiliate citizens and restrict their entrepreneurship. Moreover, administrative solidarity is unable to recognize the actual needs of the most vulnerable members of society, which should be one of its primary concerns. Solidarity, in its original meaning, understood as supportive cooperation of fellow citizens, links their rights and freedoms with mutual duties and responsibilities. Hence, an alternative framework for solidarity should be provided. This framework, committed to the idea of decency, introduces the distinction between the minimum and maximum content of solidarity enforceable by legal means, which should be translated into certain health care practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korpi and Palme’s (1998) classic “The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality” claims that universal social policy better reduces poverty than social policies targeted at the poor. This article revisits Korpi and Palme’s classic, and in the process, explores and informs a set of enduring questions about social policy, politics, and social equality. Specifically, we investigate the relationships between three dimensions of welfare transfers—transfer share (the average share of household income from welfare transfers), low-income targeting, and universalism—and poverty and preferences for redistribution. We analyze rich democracies like Korpi and Palme, but we also generalize to a broader sample of developed and developing countries. Consistent with Korpi and Palme, we show (1) poverty is negatively associated with transfer share and universalism; (2) redistribution preferences are negatively associated with low-income targeting; and (3) universalism is positively associated with transfer share. Contrary to Korpi and Palme, redistribution preferences are not related to transfer share or universalism; and low-income targeting is neither positively associated with poverty nor negatively associated with transfer share. Therefore, instead of the “paradox of redistribution” we propose two new paradoxes of social policy: non-complementarity and undermining. The non-complementarity paradox entails a mismatch between the dimensions that matter to poverty and the dimension that matters to redistribution preferences. The undermining paradox emphasizes that the dimension (transfer share) that most reduces poverty tends to increase with the one dimension (low-income targeting) that reduces support for redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent research has established that employment risk shapes social policy preferences. However, risk is often conceptualized as an alternative measure of the socio-economic status. We show that employment risk and socio-economic status are distinct, cross-cutting determinants of social policy preferences. More specifically, we analyze the policy preferences of high-skilled labor market outsiders as a cross-pressured group. We first establish that labor market vulnerability has spread well into the more highly educated segments of the population.We then show that the effect of labor market vulnerability on social policy preferences even increases with higher educational attainment. We conclude that that labor market risk and educational status are not interchangeable and that the high skilled are particularly sensitive to the experience of labormarket risk. Thereby, our findings point to a potential cross-class alliance between more highly and lower skilled vulnerable individuals in support of a redistributive and activatingwelfare state. Thus, they have far-reaching implications for our understanding of both the politicization of insider/outsider divides and the politics of welfare support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several scholars have claimed that we are currently witnessing a growing saliency of so-called 'corporate social responsibility' ( CSR). Yet, while there is a lot of work suggesting that public opinion might prompt firms to behave in socially responsible ways, there is a lack of empirical studies exploring the extent ordinary to which citizens actually support CSR. Moreover, the state is conventionally theorised as the main institutional device for governing markets and their social consequences, and there is a growing literature exploring the relationship between CSR and the state. On the basis of these observations, this article juxtaposes public attitudes towards CSR and state intervention in the market. Considering that attitudes might vary across groups with different structural relationships to the firm, this study also looks at the social bases of support for different attitude profiles. Using Swedish survey data collected in 2011 and latent class analysis, the empirical results demonstrate that most Swedes in favour of CSR are highly supportive of state intervention in the market. The study of social cleavages restates this pattern: social groups with fewer marketable resources are strongly over-represented in supporting a combination of CSR and state intervention in the market. No clear social profile is found for the relatively small group of people who support CSR but not state intervention. It is concluded that voluntary CSR is unlikely to offer a serious full-scale alternative to the welfare state: Swedes continue to think of public authorities as the ultimate institutional guarantor of social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years in Italy, population ageing, rising female labour-market participation, and the restructuring of the welfare state have combined to create increased demand for long-term care services for frail and dependent older people. The rising demand has increasingly been met by immigrant women of different nationalities, and to a lesser extent immigrant men, who are hired to provide individualised care in people's own homes and other private settings. While there have been many studies of this growing phenomenon, very little attention has been paid to the reasons that bring family care-givers to choose this care-support option. To begin to fill the gap, this paper reports the finding of a qualitative study of 26 family members who were caring for a disabled elder. Semi-structured interviews lasting between 60 and 100 minutes and that covered various aspects of long-term care in family households were conducted. The participants' responses indicate that they did not choose immigrant home eldercare assistants solely for economic reasons but also to be consistent with cultural, moral and traditional understandings of family responsibilities and care. They also provide valuable findings and insights into Italian attitudes towards the welfare state and the care-labour market. While the wealthiest respondent declared a clear predilection for the free-market and a desire to bypass the state, the majority of the respondents advocated a stronger role of the welfare state in helping people cope with the increased burden of long-term care. KEY WORDS--elder care, welfare state, care work, immigration, Italy. doi: 10.1017/S0144686X10000073

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities, which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to redistribution among high-income earners and reduce any corroding effects of ethnic diversity resulting from immigration. We test these propositions with Canadian data from the Equality, Security and Community survey. We conclude that national identity does increase support for the welfare state among the affluent majority of Canadians and that it helps to protect the welfare state from toxic effects of cultural suspicion. However, we also find that identity plays a narrower role than existing theories of liberal nationalism suggest and that the mechanisms through which it works are different. This leads us to suggest an alternative theory of the relationship between national identity and the welfare state, one that suggests that the relationship is highly contingent, reflecting distinctive features of the history and national narratives of each country. National identity may not have any general tendency to strengthen support for redistribution, but it may do so for those aspects of the welfare state seen as having played a particularly important role in building the nation or in enabling it to overcome particular challenges or crises. Cet article examine le role de l'identite nationale en matiere d'appui populaire a l'Etat-providence. Les theoriciens du nationalisme liberal soutiennent que la justice sociale sera toujours plus facile a realiser dans les Etats ayant une forte identite nationale, laquelle, selon eux, peut a la fois attenuer l'opposition a la redistribution chez les personnes a revenu eleve et reduire les effets corrosifs de la diversite ethnique engendree par l'immigration. Nous evaluons ces propositions a la lumiere des donnees canadiennes de l'Etude sur l'egalite, la securite et la communaute. Nous concluons que l'identite nationale augmente effectivement l'appui envers l'Etat-providence parmi les Canadiens fortunes de la majorite, et qu'elle aide a proteger l'Etat-providence contre les effets toxiques de la suspicion culturelle. Cependant, nous constatons egalement que l'identite joue un role plus restreint que ne le suggerent les theories existantes du nationalisme liberal et que ses mecanismes de fonctionnement sont differents. Cela nous amene a proposer une autre theorie de la relation entre l'identite nationale et l'Etat-providence, une theorie selon laquelle cette relation est fortement contingente et reflete les caracteristiques propres de l'histoire et de la tradition nationale de chaque pays. L'identite nationale n'a peutetre, en soi, aucune tendance generale a renforcer l'appui a la redistribution, mais elle peut le faire pour les aspects de l'Etat-providence consideres comme ayant joue un role particulierement important dans l'edification de la nation, ou lui ayant permis de surmonter des crises ou des defis particuliers. doi: 10.1017/S0008423910000089

Over the past 30 years, the hitherto rather homogeneous welfare states in Europe have been experiencing a dramatic influx of immigrants, making them much more diverse. The central purpose of the early development of the welfare state was twofold: to bridge class divisions and to mollify ethnic divisions in the vast multiethnic empires of 19th-century Germany and Austria. This research examines the impact of the programmatic and expenditure dimensions of the welfare state on attitudes of natives across modern publics, theorizing that nativist resentment and welfare chauvinism should be reduced in more comprehensive welfare systems. Individual, aggregate, and multilevel analyses reveal that the more comprehensive the welfare state is, the more tolerant natives are of immigrants, indicating that contemporary welfare states have a similar capacity to bridge ethnic divisions as their 19th-century incarnations. Keywords: welfare state; welfare chauvinism; decommodification; nation building; multilevel analysis; public opinion data; prejudice

This article suggests that an alternative to a social rights of citizenship approach to comparing welfare states is to use disaggregated programme expenditure data to identify the diverse spending priorities of different types of welfare state. An initial descriptive analysis shows that four major categories of social spending (cash spending on older people and those of working age; service spending on health and for other purposes) are almost entirely unrelated to one another and that different welfare state regimes or families of nations exhibit quite different patterns of spending. The article proceeds to demonstrate that both the determinants and the outcomes of these different categories of spending also differ quite radically. In policy terms, most importantly, the article shows that cross-national differences in poverty and inequality among advanced nations are to a very large degree a function of the extent of cash spending on programmes catering to the welfare needs of those of working age.

This article revisits Titmuss's essay on the Social Divisions of Welfare (SDW) and reflects on its continuing relevance. Titmuss first presented the SDW in an Eleanor Rathbone Memorial lecture at Birmingham University in 1955, but it is best known from his Essays on the Welfare State published in 1958. Titmuss challenged the stereotype of 'welfare' as simply public welfare dependency and illustrated the different elements of the SDW. Some limitations of Titmuss's approach are identified, notably in relation to how he saw dependency arising, and revisions offered. The article provides a number of examples from the UK but also highlights some significant parallels with the SDW in the USA and Australia, (1) the so-called 'liberal welfare regimes' (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Finally, it is claimed that 50 years on we need to be reminded of the insights and analytical potential of Titmuss's essay.

Why would eligible people decline an offer of welfare services? In regard to this question and in the context of changes in the welfare state, this paper discusses the shift 'from entitlements to provisions'. After sketching the size of non-take-up and the social composition of those declining the offer of services, some tentative reasons or motives for non-take-up are presented. The discussion is derived from various approaches including the capability approach, Dahrendorf's approach of the 'modern social conflict', and social quality theory (SQT). These approaches are placed in the perspective of the 'person,' as in the group/grid scheme developed by anthropologist Mary Douglas. The paper concludes that, in order to understand the phenomenon of non-take-up, a differentiated conception of the person, for which SQT is a prime inspiration, is a condition sine qua non. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chronic deficiencies of the Greek welfare state and the introduction of austerity measures as part of the international financial bailout agreements have created an explosive cocktail of poverty and social exclusion that severely tested the resilience of the frail social safety net and the demands of equity. The score on the indicators of social quality has worsened considerably as the Greek welfare system was overhauled. This article examines the four conditional factors of social quality from the viewpoint of socio-economic policies and everyday experiences in Greece during the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, there have been reforms in German family and social policy, aimed at improving reconciliation of work and family and linking receipt of welfare benefits more strongly on activation and labour market participation. Mothers receiving welfare benefits are subject to both new policies. In this article, it is investigated how these mothers succeed in entering the labour market and what its determinants are. Probabilities to take up employment are estimated from administrative data for lone mothers and mothers living with a partner. Care responsibilities in the household and mothers' labour market resources influence the process of labour market integration. Lone mothers are more likely to take up work when they don't have young children in the household than mothers living with a partner. For both groups of mothers, employment is predominantly not full-time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses Habermas's criticism of and proposal for a reformulation of the social democracy, as well as his contraposition to neoliberalism. I argue that Habermas's criticism of social democracy tends to replace radical democracy with hegemony of political parties and their bureaucratic elite, and that this tendency ultimately harms the political democratization of power. I also defend that Habermas's criticism of neoliberalism points to a neoliberal refusal of a political and economic link to social normativity, which should frame the political and economic spheres based on the universalizable interests of the Welfare State. These two aspects of Habermas' political thought are summarized in this article in the idea of reflexive continuity of the Welfare State project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper addresses two basic questions in the globalization literature: (1) is globalization a threat or an opportunity? And (2) how far does market deepening actually encourage genuine substantive democracy in the world? Many scholars have argued that globalization has resulted in increasing inequality and marginalization of the poor, which is not conducive for democracy. Drawing on the case of India, this paper, however, argues that the rolling back of the welfare state and the demise of developmentalism led to the mobilization of the masses against the elitist and exploitative agenda of globalization. As a result, a counter-hegemonic vibrant civil society has emerged, which challenges the hegemony of the elites and channels the empowerment agenda of the subaltern groups. This new politics of the subaltern is grounded on the idea of social justice and citizenship rights, which is redefining the nature of the Indian state and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feminist criticism has uncovered significant differences in the approach of welfare states to women's employment and the family not captured by more mainstream, class-based approaches. At the same time, a coherent explanation for gendered variation has been slow to develop. Exploring the French, German, and Swedish cases, this article develops a theory of welfare-state development that links the welfare state's approach to women and the family to the state's response to labor-market conditions during crucial periods of labor shortage. These three cases suggest a trade-off between the economy's dependence on immigrant labor and the welfare state's willingness to adapt to the specific interests of working mothers. This suggests a link between seemingly unrelated differences in immigration policy and the state's support for working mothers. Keywords: gender; welfare state; Germany; France; Sweden

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

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.

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.

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

In Austria, the provision of long-term care is strongly based on unpaid female work within family networks and is characterised by a highly unequal division of informal long-term caregiving. In 1993, a major reform has been introduced in the Austrian long-term care system with a payments for care programme and a state-provinces treaty regarding service development at its heart. The objective of this article is to investigate the implications of the 1993 programme on gender divisions and on whether and in what ways the programme and processes set in train by the programme influence the role of women as carers. The question is approached by applying and broadening the concept of defamilisation in a process oriented way. The analysis suggests that from the informal carers' perspective long-term care allowances in the Austrian context mean some financial relief via `symbolic payments'. At the same time, the overall long-term care system prolongs existing gender divisions and sets in train new stratification processes among women as main carers with gender, class and space as dimensions reinforcing each other.

We consider an attempt--within an economy under pressure to stay competitive in an increasingly integrated global economic system -- to reconcile the contradictory pressures of democratic values versus managerial efficiency, and of the desire for an effective social welfare safety net versus the need for budgetary responsibility. We focus on a local welfare committee's experimental attempt to improve morale and productivity through a combination of added resources and greater autonomy. The better but more expensive service produced by the experiment triggered the paradoxical conclusion that what was needed was tighter administrative oversight. The experiment and its evaluation became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. We explore the conceptual, ideological, and economic factors that shape the government's reaction, and then offer a theory of word meaning, usage, and power in public discourse that accounts for the discussion and the actions that flow from it. Nous considerons une tentative--l'interieur d'une economie sous pression pour rester concurrentielle dans un systeme economique global de plus en plus integre -- de reconcilier les pressions contradictoires a la fois des valeurs democratiques par opposition a une gestion efficiente, et du desir d'un systeme efficace de securite sociale par opposition au besoin d'une responsibilite budgetaire. Nous focalisons notre attention sur la tentative experimentale que fit un comite local d'assistance sociale pour ameliorer le moral et la productivite en combinant un apport de ressources et une autonomie accrue. Le service meilleur mais plus cher resultant de l'experience declencha la conclusion paradoxale que ce dont on avait besoin etait une supervision administrative plus stricte. L'experience et son evaluation devinrent une sorte de prophetie auto-accomplie. Nous examinons les facteurs conceptuels, ideologiques et economiques qui influencent la reaction du gouvernement, et nous offrons ensuite une theorie sur le sen s, l'utilisation et le pouvoir des mots dans le discours public, qui rend compte de la discussion et des actions qui en decoulent., Introduction The Norwegian welfare state, while in some respects offering a model of successful social support for the rest of the developed world, sometimes seems unique and thus not generalizabel [...]

Contrary to the notion of a political blockade making comprehensive reform impossible, this article argues that we have, in fact, witnessed a dual transformation of the German welfare state during the past 25 years. Increasingly, the state reduces its commitment to securing the living standard of former wage earners, which had been the key normative principle of the German welfare state in the post-war era. At the same time, the state is expanding its role in providing public support and services for families. This dual transformation has been caused by the emergence of new interpretative patterns among the political elite., At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Federal Republic of Germany to many observers seems to be afflicted by a serious illness. Low growth and high unemployment rates are [...]

I compare rural income poverty on three developing Tahitian islands in France's Overseas Territory of French Polynesia (Tubuai, Rurutu, and Raivavae). As French citizens and participants in the French welfare state, rural Tahitians have a high standard of living and social welfare. Nevertheless, economic opportunities are limited, development has been uneven, and social inequality and wealth differences are growing. Low-income families experience a relative income poverty in which they fail to achieve a culturally defined, minimum standard of living. I analyze the Tahitian social and ideological construction of poverty in which the existence of poverty is denied. I then describe the lived experience of poverty, showing that real structural constraints are ignored in islanders' assertions that their society is egalitarian and that poverty is a personal moral failure. I then analyze variability in the structural characteristics of poverty across the three islands, focusing on significant differences in 1) its incidence, 2) the population segments most vulnerable, 3) the frequency of various family and household forms and their experience of poverty, 4) rates of out-migration and island demographic profiles, and 5) islanders' strategies to avoid poverty. Finally, I discuss the roots of the inconsistency between Tahitian attitudes and the realities of rural income poverty. Key words: income poverty, development, French Polynesia

This article discusses the relationship between war, welfare policy, and class conflict in Japan. Topics include industrialization, political culture, and public assistance.

Welfare states are highly innovative when it comes to dealing with care. The range of policies in place across nations is striking as is the degree to which making provision for care cuts across long-standing principles of social provision. This article focuses on care as a policy good, identifying care as an inherently social activity and linking it with different manifestations in and anticipated outcomes of public policy. Care is developed here as one of the key activities connecting state and society. Making provision for care, it is argued, affects a whole series of societal settlements. A consideration of a number of such settlements helps to identify factors which must be taken into account when we assay the relationship between public policy, care and society. The following are primary considerations: choices around receiving care, the choice to give care, gender equity, the legitimising of care, the welfare mix, public as against private expenditure, the demand for and supply of paid and unpaid labour. Having considered some of the main variations which are to be found in European welfare states' handling of care, the article goes on to conjecture about possible outcomes of a range of policy responses on the basis of the above considerations. All provisions have particular strengths and weaknesses but `quality', understood in a broad sense, is elusive to any single measure.

The welfare state can be seen as a measure of the social protection. A major finding within the comparative welfare state research is the differences in scope, institutionalization, and effectiveness against poverty between the institutionalized forms of social protection among the industrialized Western democracies. The major question in this article is, How can we understand and explain the causal mechanism between such institutions, social norms, and human behavior? A model is presented to show that if voters/taxpayers act out of self-interest, both a selective/minimal and an encompassing/universal welfare state are likely outcomes. The different outcomes cannot be explained by the importance of the ideology of ruling political parties or that citizens in these different countries have different basic values about social justice. Instead, the argument is that the puzzle why structurally similar countries vary so much in their systems of social protection can be solved by institutional theory.