Citizen participation and empowerment are high on the political agenda of Western European welfare states. They are often pursued through processes of decentralisation with an appeal to ‘place-based’ working. Existing research focuses on citizen experiences or policymaker motivations, neglecting the perspectives of (municipal) public servants as mediators. Using an ethics of care framework, we examine the concept of ‘privileged irresponsibility’ within the context of local decision-making processes to help us understand how public servants negotiate local initiative within the spaces of local decision-making. Drawing on semi-structured in-depth interviews with twenty-three municipal public servants and managers, we show that they frequently experience an absence of care and eschew joint responsibility for concerns voiced by citizens. We show how ‘privileged irresponsibility’ depends on invisibility and normativity and is the outcome of local political relations and institutional pressures. ‘Tokenist’ forms of participation make it difficult for municipal public servants to take up ‘caring’ responsibilities towards citizens, with effects on their job satisfaction.

In the UK, some devolved governments such as in Scotland have taken a distinctive approach to implementing public service reforms. In this article, we explore the key enablers and constraints of outcome-based initiatives at the sub-national level. Drawing on a formative evaluation of the delivery of the Social Bridging Finance model, this study contributes to understanding results-oriented funding models and pluralist governance in welfare services beyond Scotland in three key ways. First, it emphasises the critical role of independent, multi-year grant funding in enabling more equitable and collaborative relationships between public bodies and the third sector. By reducing financial risk, such mechanisms challenge traditional state-led financing models. Second, it highlights the dual role of contractual agreements – supporting early sustainability discussions but revealing limitations when legal enforceability is weak. This points to the relevance of informal and relational accountability in outcome-based commissioning. Third, the study identifies the importance of collaboratively developed success criteria. The diverse experiences revealed in this study emphasise the need for flexibility, shared ownership and continuous learning – particularly given public sector responsibility for service continuity.

Although unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) were an important government intervention during the COVID-19 crisis worldwide, research covering UCTs’ impact on compliance with public health recommendations, at an individual level, remains limited to low-income countries. This study assesses the association between UCTs’ reception and compliance with public health recommendations in the United States. Longitudinal data from the Understanding Coronavirus in America panel are applied to difference-in-differences models to estimate how Economic Impact Payments’ reception, associated with the CARES Act 2020, impacted a variety of pandemic health behaviours. UCTs’ reception was associated with increased uptake of explicitly costly health behaviours, such as facemasks, but not with increased compliance amongst behaviours more generally. Moreover, results document stronger effects amongst poorer households. These findings have theoretical implications for how government transfers impact individual behaviour during periods of crisis and for the direction of future research.

A well-defined territorial boundary is essential for the design and implementation of social policies, as it defines the scope of the political community. In states where territorial boundaries are contested, the contours of sovereignty remains ambiguous. This paper studies the effects of contested perceptions of territory on welfare states. The paper distinguishes between institutional solidarity (support for formal welfare arrangements) and intergenerational social solidarity (willingness to help the other generation at a personal cost) and argues that territorial state identity independently influences both, aside from national identities and nationalism. Employing Taiwan’s social security reform as the case, and using observational data derived from the 2019 nationally representative Taiwan Image Survey alongside data from an original survey administered in Taiwan in 2023, the article demonstrates that territorial state identity enhances support for both institutional solidarity and intergenerational social solidarity. This effect persists even when controlling for nationalism. This research underscores the importance of recognising territorial boundaries consistent with the welfare apparatus for the sustainability of welfare states.

Researchers and policymakers propose a job guarantee as a means of overcoming long-term unemployment and the associated risk of social exclusion. Such a programme implies that all long-term-unemployed individuals within a certain territory are offered subsidised employment in not-for-profit enterprises or the public sector. This results in heterogeneous participation because the group of long-term-unemployed people is more diverse than often assumed. Against the background of the literature on subsidised employment, this contribution presents findings from an evaluation study of a job guarantee that was implemented in a small town in Lower Austria between 2020 and 2024. The aim of this paper is to explore the changes brought about by re-employment within a job creation scheme and in particular how the scheme coped with the diversity among the participants, which is a consequence of offering employment to all long-term-unemployed individuals. Based on data from a longitudinal mixed-methods study, the contribution shows how the project was implemented, to what extent the participants benefited from it and how the form of implementation met the different needs of participants. A typology based on qualitative data captures the diversity among the participants and shows how the scheme fits different groups. Finally, we discuss the pros and cons of the inclusion of diverse participants within one project.

Youth unemployment has been a primary concern for the European countries, especially after the 2008 Great Recession. In 2013 a Recommendation of the Council of the European Union established the Youth Guarantee (YG) as a political commitment to ensure that all young people receive a high-quality offer of employment, training or continued education within 4 months of becoming unemployed. To financially support the implementation of the YG in European countries and regions, the EU turned to the European Social Fund and created the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI). The YEI used regional disparities as a guiding criterion for the allocation of resources, but it has not been assessed at the regional level. We fill this gap by assessing the impact of the YEI on the labour market and educational outcomes of young people in EU regions that received funding between 2014 and 2018. The findings demonstrate that the YEI had a positive impact on youth opportunities in EU regions, supporting labour market integration and the return to education and training.

The financialisation of eldercare has become an internationally widespread phenomenon with significant implications. Previous literature has shown how finance-controlled providers (FCPs) initially launch their eldercare services throughout urban areas, but we know little about the ways that these providers subsequently expand their services. Focusing on nursing homes in Swedish eldercare, our aim with this paper is to develop new knowledge about the expansion strategies guiding FCPs. Deploying a Bourdieusian field perspective to analyse rich document data from Sweden’s three largest FCPs, we found that they sensed ‘booming opportunities’ following demographic trends among older citizens and economic difficulties within municipalities. However, we also find that FCPs perceived ‘looming challenges’ deriving from labour shortages and profit debates in the public sector, indicating demographic trends and economic difficulties were tough to leverage as opportunities. FCPs attempted to overcome such challenges through expansion strategies centred on acquiring eldercare providers and – most notably – building nursing homes. Our findings advance the literature on eldercare financialisation by highlighting how FCPs, in devising expansion strategies, not only adopt financial tools but also incorporate field perceptions. These strategies are ultimately utilised by FCPs to expand their positions as policy actors throughout welfare states that have undergone market-inspired reforms.

A hidden consequence of the cumulative impact of poverty, ‘hygiene poverty’ compels people to make stark choices when allocating household budgets. To increase understanding of this understudied phenomenon, we explored the prevalence of factors leading to, and impacts of, hygiene poverty in Ireland. An online survey was completed by 258 respondents during September 2023 covering a broad range of topics relating to the affordability of hygiene products. The results were analysed to identify key themes of statistical relevance in the data. Our study found 65.1 per cent of respondents had personally experienced difficulty affording essential hygiene items. Whilst lower incomes and the presence of children in the household featured, inability to afford hygiene items was also felt by those in insecure housing, people with disabilities and those from ethnic minorities. Lack of access to basic essentials prevented people from engaging fully in social, work and educational activities with negative impacts on physical and mental health across all income brackets. Drawing on existing literature alongside reporting original research, the substantive argument in this article suggests that ‘hygiene poverty’ is most usefully thought of as an aspect of deprivation, and that hygiene-related needs often sit at the bottom of a range of deprivation types.

This paper studies public opinion towards the introduction of a universal basic income in the case of Germany. Using novel data from a vignette survey experiment conducted in the summer of 2022, we analyse to what extent variations in the policy design characteristics of a hypothetical basic income scheme affect levels of support. We find that support for basic income strongly depends on these characteristics, with support being highest for schemes that are relatively generous, paid to citizens and long-term residents, paid to individuals rather than households, unconditional and financed with taxing the rich. In a further step, we explore interaction effects between vignette dimensions and respondent characteristics, finding significant heterogenous treatment effects in the cases of income, age and ideology.

This paper investigates public attitudes towards education spending based on a survey experiment. It enquires whether a trade-off between education and other welfare domains, namely healthcare, unemployment benefits and pensions, diminishes support for higher public spending on education. Drawing on five Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico and Turkey), the paper demonstrates that education spending preferences are contingent on the nature of trade-offs and the priorities of the stakeholder groups. Testing the predictive power of age, income, ideology, labour market positioning and gender, our research finds robust support for public spending on education across all countries. Nonetheless, this support diminishes significantly when trade-offs that are linked to cuts in other welfare domains are introduced.

This study explores the link between receiving basic income support (BIS) and political alienation in Germany, with a focus on political trust and satisfaction with democracy. We argue that receiving BIS is associated with experiences of material and social exclusion and impairs subjective social integration. Against the background of major structural welfare reforms in recent decades, we assume that BIS recipients are likely to attribute responsibility for their socio-economic disadvantages to the wider political system. We use data from the Panel Study Labour Market and Social Security (PASS) for the years 2019–2021 and employ multivariate regression analysis. We find that political alienation is more likely to occur among recipients of BIS, especially long-term recipients, than among non-recipients. Social exclusion is an important mechanism: With a higher risk of material deprivation and fewer opportunities for social participation and civic engagement than non-recipients, BIS recipients are more likely to experience subjective social exclusion, which, in turn, contributes to their political alienation. Moreover, our study offers indications that trustful and supportive interactions with welfare authorities can mitigate tendencies of political alienation among BIS recipients.

The transition in welfare states from compensatory to service-oriented models also implies a shift of the locus of action from the state to local administrations. Cities in particular seek space within national bounds to devise their own policy solutions targeted to city-specific needs as a more responsive government layer, with the prospect of providing more targeted service provision on the basis of locality and proximity principles. Whether such social innovation potential is met depends on scope conditions, such as the learning environment, the design of the decentralisation and the capacity of cities to scale up smaller projects. In this paper, we trace the policy process around local social investment innovations in Amsterdam across three domains: addressing teacher shortages, combatting energy poverty and integrating the long-term unemployed into the labour market. In each of the domains, Amsterdam emerged as a frontrunner and innovator, instigating broader change. The city is at the frontier of societal change and acts as ‘a stopgap’, filling gaps left by national policy default. Overall, the case of Amsterdam shows the importance in adopting a multi-level perspective in studying new dynamics in welfare state transitions.

The development of childcare policy can be understood as a process shaped by conflicts across multiple, interconnected dimensions of policymaking. Whilst existing literature often emphasises tensions between established policy legacies and emerging paradigms such as work–family reconciliation and social investment, this study introduces a multi-dimensional framework that includes conflict and negotiation processes between competing policies co-existing within the policy domain but also within policies themselves, emphasising the dynamics of self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedbacks. Our analysis reveals how efforts to resolve tensions in one policy dimension can inadvertently trigger new conflicts in other dimensions. By examining the South Korean case over three decades, we demonstrate how such interwoven tensions drive long-term policy change, offering scholars a more nuanced understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying policy evolution.

Paternity leave may promote greater gender equality in domestic labour. Though numerous studies show that paternity leave promotes greater fathers’ involvement in childcare, less is known about whether paternity leave-taking may facilitate fathers’ involvement in other forms of domestic labour such as housework. Using repeated cross-sectional data on different-gender partnered US parents from the Study on Parents’ Divisions of Labor During COVID-19 (SPDLC), this study examines the extent to which paternity leave-taking and length of paternity leave are associated with US fathers’ shares of, and time spent on, housework. Findings suggest that paternity leave-taking is positively associated with fathers’ shares of, and time spent on, housework tasks. Longer paternity leaves are also associated with fathers performing greater shares of housework. Overall, this study indicates that the benefits of paternity leave likely extend to fathers’ greater participation in housework, providing additional support for the belief that increased use of paternity leave may help to promote gender equality in domestic labour.

Latin American countries have pioneered innovations in social protection, but their welfare institutions suffer from large and persistent gaps and inequalities in access and provision. This article reviews the substantive body of research addressing this anomaly. A focus on social protection offers a window on what is distinctive about social policy in the region. The social protection matrix in Latin America combines three core institutions: occupational insurance funds, personal pensions and social assistance. The article highlights the role of political realignments shaping current institutions. The critical review yields several pointers for a ‘general’ theory of welfare institutions.

Here we examine interactions between centralised and devolved employment policy and welfare in Scotland, Wales and England, taking a qualitative approach to gain a street-level perspective. This paper’s twin aims are to challenge the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of welfare regimes and to offer a substate alternative through a street-level perspective. In the context of prevailing trends towards activation measures and mixed economies of welfare across Western Europe, the UK’s work first approach and categorisation as a Liberal welfare regime of minimal provision is complexified using a devolved policy context.

Our findings on cross-jurisdictional interactions show devolved employment programmes in Scotland and Wales actively reshaping welfare delivery in ways that resist the UK’s historically centralised approach. We contribute to a growing body of literature on substate welfare regimes with significant implications for the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of work and welfare.

This paper contributes to an emerging discussion in social policy scholarship concerning inequality and the potential of regulation targeting the richest in society. It focuses on public support for maximum income, a policy understood as ‘eco-social’ due to its potential to address the dual crises of increasing inequality and the climate emergency. Based on fifty qualitative interviews conducted in Belgium, the study aims to understand how people reason about the idea of capping the maximum level of income and whether there is potential to increase public support depending on how the policies are designed. The proposal of maximum income prompts rather polarised reactions among supporters and opponents. We identify four distinctive positions: the egalitarian, the supporter of redistribution, the meritocrat and the libertarian. While they are characterised by ideological divergence, both the proponents and opponents of maximum income share concerns about the implementation of such a policy. Using vignettes of differently designed proposals for maximum income, the study also identifies several trade-offs that should be considered when designing a maximum income policy that can secure broad public support.

In 2015 the UK government abolished means-tested child-related social security payments to households for third or subsequent children born from April 2017 (the ‘two-child limit’). From 2017 to 2021 there was a sustained increase in the number of abortions annually in England, following a previously flat trend. Using abortion-level microdata from the Department for Health and Social Care, we analysed whether this increase was primarily among women with two or more existing children in more deprived areas, consistent with being a response to the two-child limit. Descriptive analysis and interrupted time series modelling showed that the increase in numbers of abortions over time was not associated with having more children or living in more deprived areas. Instead, from 2017 onwards the previously declining trend among people with no or one previous births reversed. The pattern of change at area level was nearly identical across deciles of the Index of Multiple Deprivation. The cumulative impoverishing effects of austerity may affect abortion decision-making in England generally, but the two-child limit specifically is not associated with the change that followed its introduction. The primary drivers of recent increases in abortions may be non-material, such as uncertainty about the future beyond immediate financial considerations.