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Paternalism in Australian parliamentary debate: the case of drug testing social security recipients Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Katherine Curchin, Thomas Weight, Alison Ritter
Across the globe, welfare conditionality and sanctioning increasingly permeate social welfare programs. Paternalism is one of the key normative rationales invoked when both scholars and politicians debate the legitimacy of this reform. With a view to bringing the scholarly and political debates into closer conversation with each other, this paper examines how paternalism manifests in political debate
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Which training leads to employment? The effectiveness of varying types of training programmes for unemployed jobseekers in Flanders Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Jonas Wood, Karel Neels, Sunčica Vujić
Despite the large body of ALMP evaluations focussing on isolated training programmes for unemployed jobseekers, our understanding of potential reasons for (in)effectiveness remains limited. Specific training programmes aim to remediate particular supply- or demand-side barriers to employment experienced by targeted jobseekers. Consequently, this study unpacks training into four different types: (I)
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Housing affordability and poverty in Europe: on the deteriorating position of market renters Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Rod Hick, Marco Pomati, Mark Stephens
There are growing concerns about housing affordability throughout Europe. Recent studies by Housing Europe and the OECD have suggested that we are witnessing a generalised deterioration in housing affordability, while other studies point to worsening housing affordability for specific groups, such as renters or low-income households. The aim of this paper is to explore trends in, and incidences and
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Beyond individual responsibility – towards a relational understanding of financial resilience through participatory research and design Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Anne Angsten Clark, Sara Davies, Richard Owen, Keir Williams
This paper contributes to an increasingly critical assessment of a policy framing of ‘financial resilience’ that focuses on individual responsibility and financial capability. Using a participatory research and design process, we construct a ground-up understanding of financial resilience that acknowledges not only an individual’s actions, but the contextual environment in which they are situated,
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Social and environmental protection: the effects of social insurance generosity on the acceptance of material sacrifices for the sake of environmental protection Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-01-23 Sverker Sjöstrand
Studies on climate change mitigation and environmental degradation suggest that lifestyle changes in high-income countries can help promote environmental sustainability. Such changes may include material sacrifices on the part of the individual. Yet, accepting material sacrifices can be a challenging task for both individuals and countries. Can publicly provided economic protection facilitate the acceptance
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Systems thinking for better social policy: a case study in financial wellbeing Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Jeremiah Thomas Brown, Jack Noone, Fanny Salignac
Social problems are becoming increasingly complex. Policymakers, thus, cannot solve these issues with a single policy instrument. For example, while decades of research have examined the individual factors that influence financial stress, less is known about how organisations, social structures, policies, social norms, and large-scale events interact to affect one’s financial wellbeing. Using a systems
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A dynamic perspective on profiling financial-aid eligibility: the case of South Africa Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-12-12 Emma Whitelaw, Nicola Branson, Murray Leibbrandt
The sustainable funding of tertiary education is a subject of significant policy debate worldwide. In South Africa, the need to balance equitable access within a constrained fiscal environment has been a complex challenge. A legacy of racially segregated educational opportunities, together with student activism and protests, has shaped the political economy surrounding tertiary education funding. Policymakers
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Overcoming hybridisation in global welfare regime classifications: lessons from a single case study Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Zahid Mumtaz, Antonios Roumpakis, Mulyadi Sumarto
The hybridisation of welfare regimes is a critical issue in social policy literature due to the lack of a uniform dependent variable and the comparative, international scope of social policy analysis, and data availability. We argue that what is presented in the global welfare regime literature as an analytical problem of classification or transitioning could also, in fact, be treated as a methodological
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Not that basic: how level, design, and context matter for the redistributive outcomes of universal basic income Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Elise Aerts, Ive Marx, Gerlinde Verbist
Proponents of a basic income (BI) claim that, on top of many other benefits, it could bring significant reductions in financial poverty. Using microsimulation analysis in a comparative two-country setting, we show that the potential poverty-reducing impact of BI strongly depends on exactly how and where it is implemented. Implementing a BI requires far more choices than advocates seem to realise. The
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Embedded and exterior practices of cross-sector co-production: the impact of fields Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-12-06 Lars Skov Henriksen, Morten Frederiksen, Ane Grubb
Cross-sector co-production involving voluntary organisations in the production and delivery of social services has been adopted across many welfare states. Economic and demographic changes have led to increased involvement of volunteer initiatives in different welfare policy fields. How different field properties enable, constrain, and shape co-production practices remains, however, under researched
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Making the most of language acquisition of Syrian asylum permit holders in the Netherlands: the role of policy factors examined Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Linda Bakker, Jaco Dagevos, Maja Djundeva
In this article, we examine the relationship between important types of policies for asylum permit holders in the Netherlands and the improvement in their command of Dutch. As far as asylum policy is concerned, we find that participation in activities in the asylum seekers reception centre – and in particular, following Dutch language classes – contribute to an improvement in Syrian asylum permit holders’
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Policy feedback and income targeting in the welfare state Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Tijs Laenen, Sarah Marchal, Wim Van Lancker
In light of ongoing debates about income targeting in the welfare state, this article explores how the design and outcomes of income targeting policies are related to popular targeting preferences. Based on the unique combination of fine-grained opinion and policy indicators in a multilevel analysis, the results show that targeting preferences are indeed empirically related to targeting policies. However
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Ethnic differences in intergenerational housing mobility in England and Wales Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Franz Buscha, Emma Gorman, Patrick Sturgis, Min Zhang
Home ownership is the largest component of wealth for most households and its intergenerational transmission underpins the production and reproduction of economic inequalities across generations. Yet, little is currently known about ethnic differences in the intergenerational transmission of housing tenure. In this paper, we use linked Census data covering 1971–2011 to document rates of intergenerational
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Impact of unconditional cash transfers on household livelihood outcomes in Nigeria Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Titilope F. Eluwa, George I. E. Eluwa, Apera Iorwa, Babajide O. Daini, Kabir Abdullahi, Modasola Balogun, Sanni Yaya, Bright O. Ahinkorah, Abdullahi Lawal
In 2018, Nigeria began the implementation of a cash transfer programme (CCT) for poor and vulnerable people. We evaluated the impact of cash transfer on household livelihood outcomes in Nigeria. Using multistage cluster sampling methodology, beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries within the same locality were randomly selected to participate in a survey to assess the impact of cash transfer on food security
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Fewer obligations for welfare recipients, more social and economic activities? Results from an experiment with less conditional welfare regimes Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-11-23 János Betkó, Niels Spierings, Maurice Gesthuizen, Peer Scheepers
This article presents results of a Dutch randomised experiment, challenging the ‘workfare’ paradigm, which is dominant in many countries. We study whether social assistance (SA) schemes with fewer conditions and more autonomy for recipients stimulate valuable but often overlooked unpaid socio-economic activities (USEA), which are not classified as work. In the qualitative part of the mixed method study
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‘Unprecedented injustice’: Digitalisation and the perceived accessibility of childcare benefits Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Bryn Hummel, Mara A. Yerkes, Michèlle Bal
The Netherlands recently experienced a crisis in childcare benefits, leading to ‘unprecedented injustice’ for many parents falsely accused of defrauding the childcare benefit system. This crisis highlights multiple barriers in parents’ ability to access childcare already evident prior to the crisis, including the far-reaching digitalisation of social policies and childcare benefits in particular. Digitalisation
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Employer-provided childcare across the 50 United States: the normative importance of public childcare and female leadership Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Rosa Daiger von Gleichen
Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE)
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Social functioning and personal development among individuals with low literacy skills; the role of active labour market policy Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-10-20 Oda Nordheim, Tim Huijts
Even as education becomes increasingly important for functioning in society, and many welfare states have taken responsibility for providing education, many individuals have insufficient skill levels to fully participate in society. This paper investigates the relationship between literacy skills and basic functioning and participation in society, focusing on the role of the welfare state, and whether
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Does young adulthood caring influence educational attainment and employment in the UK and Germany? Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Markus Klaus King, Baowen Xue, Rebecca Lacey, Giorgio Di Gessa, Morten Wahrendorf, Anne McMunn, Christian Deindl
Informal care plays an important role in the provision of care. However, previous research has mainly focused on middle- or older-aged informal carers and less is known about informal care among young adults, its consequences on educational achievement and employment transitions and whether this varies across country contexts. Using data from the 2009–2018 waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study
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Welfare attitudes in a crisis: How COVID exceptionalism undermined greater solidarity Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-10-04 Robert de Vries, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Lisa Scullion, Kate Summers, Daniel Edmiston, Jo Ingold, David Robertshaw, David Young
COVID-19 had the potential to dramatically increase public support for welfare. It was a time of apparent increased solidarity, of apparently deserving claimants, and of increasingly widespread exposure to the benefits system. However, there are also reasons to expect the opposite effect: an increase in financial strain fostering austerity and self-interest, and thermostatic responses to increasing
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Informal third-party actors in street-level welfare decisions: a case study of Pakistan social assistance Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-09-26 Aniqa Farwa, Paul Henman
Research on street-level bureaucracy has tended to focus on individual and organisational factors that influence street-level practice. To date, empirical research has insufficiently explored the contribution of wider socio-cultural factors in street-level decision making. Drawing on data from a qualitative study of social assistance in Pakistan, this article examines how cultural patronage practices
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Parental homeownership and education: the implications for offspring wealth inequality in Great Britain Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Paul Gregg, Ricky Kanabar
The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly
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Selection into maternity leave length and long-run maternal health in Germany Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-09-12 Lara Bister, Peter Eibich, Roberta Rutigliano, Mine Kühn, Karen van Hedel
Existing literature shows the importance of maternity leave as a strategy for women to balance work and family responsibilities. However, only a few studies focused on the long-run impact of maternity leave length on maternal health. Therefore, how exactly they are related remains unclear. We examine women’s selection into different lengths of maternity leave as a potential explanation for the inconclusive
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Suspicious Minds? Media effects on the perception of disability benefit claimants Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Ben Baumberg Geiger
The media are often blamed for widespread perceptions that welfare benefit claimants are undeserving in Anglo-Saxon countries – yet people rarely justify their views through media stories, instead saying that they themselves know undeserving claimants. In this paper, I explain this contradiction by hypothesising that the media shapes how we interpret ambiguous interpersonal contact. I focus on disability
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Child-related Social Policies in Europe during the COVID-19 Pandemic Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-08-24 Mary Daly, Sunwoo Ryu
Looking at core features of child and family related spending and policy design, and covering five domains of policy, the paper offers new empirical evidence and an original perspective for better understanding how EU countries and the UK responded to the needs of children and families during the pandemic and how to classify responses in terms of child-centredness. The paper is driven by a concept
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Take-up and distribution of a universal cash benefit: The case of the Austrian long-term care allowance Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Astrid Pennerstorfer, August Österle
The body of research on the take-up of social benefits is growing, but rarely focuses on universal cash benefits, especially in the field of long-term care. This paper is concerned with the long-term care (LTC) allowance in Austria, a universal cash benefit paid to those in need of LTC on seven different levels of dependency. It investigates whether take-up and distribution of the benefit reflect need
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Recognising and addressing wealth privilege in policymaking through an analysis of epistemic practice and agency Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Sarah Kerr
The author makes the case that wealth inequality ramifies in the communicative practices of policymaking in ways which produce specific forms of epistemic injustice. Relative epistemic authority between richer and poorer knowers is established by limiting some speakers to being sources of information, and elevating others to the epistemically more sophisticated role of inquirer. In its systemic form
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Understanding informal care burden domains’ impact on overall burden – a structural equation modeling approach with cross-sectional data from Germany Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Katharina Loboiko, Michael Steiner, Sabine Bohnet-Joschko
Informal caregivers are the core of long-term care for older and disabled people. Although previous research has studied factors that influence caregivers’ burden, little is known about the different care domains and why they influence the caregivers’ perceived burden. Drawing on a large-scale German survey, the current study makes a first attempt to address this research gap. The study used cross-sectional
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A Fast Track to Social Rights? Passported Benefits and Administrative Burden Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-23 Noam Tarshish, John Gal, Roni Holler, Avishai Benish, Momi Dahan
Passported benefits are additional benefits provided to individual or households based on a previous eligibility to a “primary” social security benefit. Although passported benefits should be easier to claim, in reality the claiming process is often cumbersome and results in low take-up. Drawing on an Israeli case study, we offer a conceptual framework to categorize and analyse the varieties of passported
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Competition and childcare quality: Evidence from Quebec Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Vincent Chandler, Maryam Dilmaghani
Since 1997, the Canadian province of Quebec has put in place a heavily subsidized universal childcare program for all children under the school age. The present paper examines how the level of competition among individual providers associates with the quality of childcare in Quebec. The quality of childcare is measured by the number of violations and penalties recorded in the inspections conducted
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(In)visible Sanctions: Micro-level Evidence on Compulsory Activation for Young Welfare Recipients Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Bård Smedsvik, Roberto Iacono
Since the early years of activation and workfare in the 1990s, the use of welfare conditionality and benefit sanctions has been proposed among the necessary solutions to ensure the efficiency of welfare policy by reinforcing individual economic incentives. Using rich administrative registers from Norway, we produce micro-level quantitative evidence on compulsory activation for young recipients of social
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Logistics of care: Trust-reform and self-managing teams in municipal home care services Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Helle Cathrine Hansen, Cecilie Basberg Neumann
The central idea in trust-reform is to improve service delivery by granting professional autonomy and acknowledging the experiential knowledge of professionals. In this article, we study trust-reform bottom-up from the perspective of frontline care workers. Our aim is to discuss the challenges for care work and care workers who have been organised in self-managing teams, paying particular attention
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The Impact of (In)Stability of Pension System on Retirement Timing: Macro-Level Analysis Based on “Certainty Effect” Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Łukasz Jurek
Retirement timing is an issue of great political importance these days. Policy-makers develop various initiatives encouraging workers to postpone retirement beyond the statutory retirement age. This effort brings, however, just minimal outcomes. Although increasing opportunities and abilities to work in old age, in some countries people tend to retire as soon as it is possible. In economic terms, they
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How has the idea of prevention been conceptualised and progressed in adult social care in England? Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Jerry Tew, Sandhya Duggal, Sarah Carr
Over recent years, a preventative approach has been promoted within adult social care policy and practice in England. However, progress has been somewhat inconsistent, in part due to issues around conceptualising what exactly prevention means within this context. Particularly since the financial crisis, there have emerged tensions between seeing prevention as a positive strategy to build assets and
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Employer Engagement with Third-Sector Activation Programmes for Vulnerable Groups: Interrogating Logics and Roles Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Peter Butler, Jonathan Payne
Employer engagement with active labour market programmes (ALMPs) and related employability projects is seen as vital to their ‘success’. However, the role of employers remains under-researched – a gap which widens in relation to non-governmental programmes led by not-for-profit, third-sector organisations (TSOs). Recent studies suggest that engaging employers may depend on addressing both human resource
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How Incarcerating Children Affects their Labour Market Outcomes Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Richard Dorsett, David Thomson
We investigate the labour market effects of incarcerating children. Using linked administrative data to track outcomes for English schoolchildren, we estimate an econometric model of transitions between education, custody, employment and NEET (not in employment, education or training), along with earnings for those starting work. We allow outcomes to vary according to the individual’s state in the
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Incoherent and Indefensible? A Normative Analysis of Young People’s Position in England’s Welfare and Homelessness Systems Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Kit Colliver
Young people experience different treatment compared to older adults in the English welfare and homelessness systems, encountering varying levels of protection and disadvantage. This paper uses a value-pluralist perspective to explore the normative rationales for and the ethical defensibility of these policy differences. Evidence from 38 key informant interviews suggests that the English homelessness
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State inspection in contexts of cultural and sociopolitical conflict: The case of social services offered to Arab-Palestinian young women in Israel Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Lia Levin, Haneen Karram-Elias, Shira Pagorek Eshel, Raghda Alnabilsy
Inspectors are the executing branch of state regulation. Existing literature focuses on their tasks and operations, mostly with regard to their commitments to the state and their complex relations with inspectees. The present study explores a heretofore-unexamined issue: the playing out of inspection in a sociopolitical context of national conflict and discriminatory majority-minority relations. Namely
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The welfare state and the roles of social capital in subjective well-being: The crowding-out and crowding-in arguments revisited Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Naoki Akaeda
In international comparative research, significant advances have been made in the study of the effect of social capital and the welfare state on subjective well-being (SWB). However, few studies have examined how the welfare state influences the impact of social capital on SWB. To fill this gap, from the perspectives of the crowding-out and crowding-in hypotheses, this study explores whether welfare
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Technology and homecare in the UK: Policy, storylines and practice Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-04-13 Kate Hamblin, Diane Burns, Cate Goodlad
UK policy discourse presents technology as a solution to challenges facing care services, including issues of quality and the mismatch between care workforce supply and demand. This discourse characterises technology as ‘transformative’, homogenous and wholly positive for care delivery, eliding the diversity of digital devices and systems and their varied uses. Our paper draws on data gathered through
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Legitimate child protection interventions and the dimension of confidence: A comparative analysis of populations views in six European countries Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Mathea Loen, Marit Skivenes
The legitimacy of welfare state institutions is a key question in public policy research. In this study we examine population’s confidence in child protection systems, the role of institutional context and moral alignment. Analysing representative samples of survey data (N=6,043) of citizens in six European countries (Czechia, England, Finland, Norway, Poland and Romania), we find that overall people
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Between left and right: A discourse network analysis of Universal Basic Income on Dutch Twitter Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Erwin Gielens, Femke Roosma, Peter Achterberg
Universal Basic Income (UBI) found its way back to media and policy agendas, presented as an alternative to the social investment policies omnipresent in Europe. In spite of the apparent appeal, however, UBI faces a discursive and political stalemate that seems hard to overcome. In an attempt to understand this tension, we explore the discursive coalitions surrounding UBI in a debate on Dutch Twitter
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A safety net for all? – Vignette-based assessments of Swedish social assistance over three decades Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Åke Bergmark, Hugo Stranz
Swedish welfare is often characterized as comprehensive and generous. Social assistance constitutes the final safety net in the Swedish model. Unlike most other benefits, eligibility and subsidy levels are here subject to extensive means-testing, with eligibility determined by individual caseworkers. In this article, we explore the extent to which eligibility determination and generosity of benefits
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Class Conflict or Consensus? Understanding Social Partner Positions on Social Policy Reforms Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-17 Benedikt Bender
This paper addresses the positions of unions and employer associations towards the level of unemployment benefits and active labour market policy (ALMP). These are prominent examples of social compensation and social investment policies respectively. The new dataset ‘Reform Monitor on Political Conflict’ (ReMoPo) is based on expert interviews and a systematic text analysis of all relevant press releases
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Horses for Courses: Subject Differences in the Chances of Securing Different Types of Graduate Jobs in the UK Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Wil Hunt, B. Baldauf, C. Lyonette
Analysis of the 2010/11 Longitudinal Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey shows that overly-simplistic conceptions of graduate success underestimate the value of obtaining a degree in some subjects. Using a skills-based classification of graduate jobs the research finds that maths and vocationally-oriented subjects associated with higher earnings returns (Belfield et al., 2018a, 2018b)
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Advancing Value Pluralist Approaches to Social Policy Controversies: A Case Study of Welfare Conditionality Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Beth Watts-Cobbe, Suzanne Fitzpatrick
‘Value pluralism’ is a strand of analytical philosophy that posits the plurality of morally significant values. By enabling systematic mapping of the diversity of moral registers within which social policy concerns might legitimately be considered, we contend that value pluralist-inspired analysis can aid constructive policy dialogue. Our argument is founded on four claims: first, as a matter of normative
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The Participation of People in Vulnerable Situations in Interest Organisations: A Qualitative Study of Representatives Views Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Jan Marius Gathen, Tor Slettebø, Erik Skjeggestad
People in vulnerable situations have the same right as others to participate in public spheres and influence health and welfare services. However, organisations that support these people and promote their interests are essential to their participation. This study investigated how people in vulnerable situations with lived experiences of using public services participate in organisations representing
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Social Policy Expansion and Retrenchment in Latin America: Causal Paths to Successful Reform Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Sara Niedzwiecki, Jennifer Pribble
The literature on social policy expansion and retrenchment in Latin America is vast, but scholars differ in how they explain outcomes, arriving at different conclusions about the role of democracy, left parties, favorable economic conditions, and social movements. What can welfare state developments since the end of the commodity boom teach us about the theoretical power of these arguments? This paper
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Why is Lived Experience Absent from Social Security Policymaking? Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-02-20 Ewen Speed, Aaron Reeves
Processes of public engagement in decision-making and research are increasingly discussed as ways of addressing democratic deficits in high-income countries. In this paper, we explore why these processes of engagement and involvement in the UK have been less successfully incorporated into social security policymaking aimed at the out-of-work by drawing a comparison with health policy, a sphere in which
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Exploring Social Entrepreneurship Co-Production Processes in the Disability Sector: Individual and Collection Action Views Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Liang Shang, Yanto Chandra
From a humble experiment to tackle social problems, social enterprises (SEs) have transformed into key co-producers for a wide range of social services. However, despite an increasing interest in co-production, most SE studies in the field adopted a single-sided view of co-production, thereby limiting what co-production entails and how it works in SE. Drawing upon the New Public Governance (NPG) framework
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No Longer ‘Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards’? Advances in Local State-Voluntary and Community Sector Relationships During Covid-19 Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Joanne Cook, Harriet Thiery, Jon Burchell
Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis
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A time of need: Exploring the changing poverty risk facing larger families in the UK Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Kitty Stewart, Ruth Patrick, Aaron Reeves
Despite its significance in determining poverty risk, family size has received little focus in recent social policy analysis. This paper provides a correction, focusing squarely on the changing poverty risk of larger families (those with three or more dependent children) in the UK over recent years. It argues that we need to pay much closer attention to how and why poverty risk differs according to
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Changes in Working Women’s Self-Reported Subjective Wellbeing and Quality of Interpersonal Relationships During COVID-19: A Quantitative Comparison of Essential and Non-essential Workers in Singapore Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Poh Lin Tan, Jeremy Lim-Soh
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected working women’s well-being in different ways due to contrasting national responses. This article focuses on the specific context of Singapore, which implemented differentiated rules for workers: essential workers continued to report to workplaces, while non-essential workers were required to work from home. This policy had far-reaching implications for working women
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Outcome-based contracting and gaming practices in marketised public employment services. Dilemmas from the Italian case Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Gianluca Scarano
Concerns about the unintended effects of marketised public employment services are increasingly expressed because there is mounting evidence that such services are frequently characterised by various gaming practices on the part of their providers. To prevent these unintended consequences, payment-by-result approaches have been progressively strengthened. The aim of the research reported in this article
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Charities’ income during the COVID-19 pandemic: administrative evidence for England and Wales Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 David Clifford, Diarmuid McDonnell, John Mohan
This paper provides a detailed overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the income of charitable organisations – an under-researched theme within social policy, which thus far has largely focused on the impact of the pandemic on individuals’ and households’ wellbeing. It analyses a unique longitudinal dataset that follows through time c.90,000 charities in England and Wales. The results,
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Deserving more? A vignette study on the role of self-interest and deservingness opinions for popular support for wealth taxation in Germany Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Patrick Sachweh, Debora Eicher
This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth
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Weakly institutionalized, heavily contested: Does support for contemporary welfare reforms rely on norms of distributive justice? Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-13 Arno Van Hootegem, Koen Abts, Bart Meuleman
Three reforms each appealing to a different logic of (re)distribution are strongly politicized in contemporary welfare states: means-tested benefits, demanding activation policies and basic income schemes. While the policy design of means-tested benefits relies on the distributive justice principle of need, demanding activation policies are intrinsically related to the principle of equity and basic
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Social Policy in a Climate Emergency Context: Towards an Ecosocial Research Agenda Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-12 Tuuli Hirvilammi, Liisa Häikiö, Håkan Johansson, Max Koch, Johanna Perkiö
Social policy developed as a research field and academic discipline to ensure protection from social risks in the era of emerging capitalism and industrialization. While welfare states have successfully increased their citizens’ wellbeing, they have also contributed to the ecological crisis, while the shared scientific understanding of exceeded planetary boundaries and worsening climate change scenarios
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A Framework for Evaluating the Adequacy of Disability Benefit Programs and its Application to the U.S. Social Security Disability Programs Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Zachary A. Morris
The degree to which disability benefit programs provide an adequate standard of living to those with work-limiting disabilities has long been overlooked in social policy research. This paper presents a framework for assessing disability-related decommodification and then applies that framework to an analysis of the Social Security Disability (SSD) programs in the United States. The paper draws on survey
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Socio-Economic Gaps in Workers’ Participation in Private Pension Programmes in Ten European Countries Journal of Social Policy (IF 2.654) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Sara Gonzales, Juan J. Fernández
In recent decades, many European governments have passed pension reforms to incentivise participation in private pension plans. However, we still have minimal understanding of whether participation in such plans is concentrated in certain groups or spread uniformly across society, or what their stability over time is. To illuminate the social selectivity of these plans and potential changes in that