In an attempt to counter changes in family structures, a number of nation states are designing policies to make men fit into families. In the case of the USA, decision makers view fatherhood and marriage as the cure for poverty among African Americans. To assert that training these men to be better fathers and husbands will help them improve other dimensions of their lives (particularly poverty) is a good idea, but it is also simplistic. Decision makers rely on an intra-group, which privileges an individualistic and cultural approach, in their development of policies. This approach tends to ignore that other subsystems, such as previously existing policies, can have an impact on the effectiveness of marriage and fatherhood promotion. Using the USA as a case study, I hypothesise that the effectiveness of fatherhood and marriage promotion is limited because of their interaction with other policies. Fatherhood and marriage promotion initiatives will be negatively affected by the absence of a progressive national urban policy, particularly in the area of economic development and in the context of current crime policies. The socio-economic and cultural reality faced by African American men must be incorporated into the decision-making processes in order to identify the most effective policies.

The Children's Fund involved the development of partnerships in every local authority in England to prevent the social exclusion of children and young people. This article draws from the national evaluation of this initiative to consider the strategies used to implement the Fund, and reflect on their capacity to address the multiple dimensions of exclusion experienced by marginalised groups of children and young people. It discusses the contested nature of the concept of social exclusion, but argues that this is a useful framework for understanding the processes by which children may become excluded and for assessing the capacity of strategies to address this. It concludes that the Children's Fund is likely to have limited long-term impact in this respect.

Social assistance programmes involving cash transfers to poor and vulnerable households have become a major focus of development policy in recent years. This article compares the experiences of three such programmes in Latin America: Oportunidades in Mexico, Jefes y Jefas de Hogares in Argentina, and Brazil's social pension. Particular attention is given to each programme's administrative effectiveness, as well as their impacts on poverty, human capital, and household and gender dynamics. More broadly, the article assesses whether these schemes live up to their billing as ‘best practice’ for developing countries, and how they relate to wider shifts in the political economy of welfare provision. It concludes that experiences have been mixed, that claims about positive outcomes are sometimes exaggerated, and that the potential of these programmes to substantially re-orientate welfare systems and promote equitable public policies remains limited.

The high rate of trade union membership in Nordic countries is often attributed to the way in which unemployment insurance is organised: that is, as a voluntary scheme which is administered by trade union-linked funds (the so-called Ghent system). However, since trade unions and unemployment insurance funds are formally independent from each other, and alternatives to traditional trade union-linked unemployment funds are available, it is far from clear why the more expensive option of a dual membership in trade union and unemployment insurance is generally favoured. Comparing current characteristics and the operation of the Ghent system in Denmark and Sweden, the article identifies incentives for joining an unemployment insurance fund per se and, secondly, factors which make such a dual membership appealing. It shows that some of these apply to both countries, such as the strong identification with trade unions or the lack of a transparent institutional separation, while others are country-specific, such as job search support in Denmark and access to improved benefit provision in Sweden.

The Hutubi Rural Social Security Loan programme is a policy innovation in a rural area of China, which loans savings in social security accounts back to peasants for them to buy assets for agricultural and other development. In contrast to the nationwide recession in rural social security, this programme has shown its success in proliferating rural social security funds and retaining social security participants. With a focus on the administrative data of the loan programme, this study aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the loan programme and examine how asset building is possible for the poor when institutional incentives are offered. The findings show that when proper policy incentives are provided, poor peasants can build assets. The Hutubi programme may be a good model for other rural areas in China and other developing countries.

In 2004, 9 per cent of female employees took advantage of the system of ‘career break’ or ‘time credit’ in Flanders, compared to only 3 per cent of male workers. Although the number of men taking a career break is increasing, they remain a small group. In this article the time use of men interrupting their careers full-time or part-time is compared to that of full-time working men, using representative time use data from 2004. Analyses show that a career break does not imply a reduced workload. Half of the men interrupting their career full-time do so to try out another job. Men who take part-time leave are mainly motivated by their desire for a better work and family life balance. About 80 per cent of the time they gain by working on a part-time basis is allocated to household and childcare activities. This suggests that encouraging men to work fewer hours could well be the best policy for achieving gender equality.

The individual's commitment to work has occupied a central place in much welfare state research. This centrality relates to beliefs that welfare system design influences the ways in which people come to value employment. If, as believed, generous benefit systems diminish citizens' willingness to work, then these systems undermine both the legitimacy and the performance of the welfare state. This article explores change and stability in work commitment in a Norwegian cohort born between 1965 and 1968. We investigate whether and if so how individuals' experience with the welfare system and their personal, family or work experiences influenced their level of work commitment between 1993 and 2003, from adolescence to adulthood. Findings show work commitment as relatively stable across the ten years, with some individual-level change relative to changes in family life (such as becoming a parent) and in work experience (such as long-term unemployment). Results indicate that the fear of disincentive effects on individuals' work commitment is exaggerated.

Despite the fact that women's rights have been increasingly defined as equal to men's in law and policy, in post-Second World War Japan women continue to be at a disadvantage in many aspects of social and economic life. Drawing from a survey of 2,205 Japanese women, this article focuses in particular on women's home ownership as a new catalyst behind increasing social stratification in Japan. The women's experiences are closely linked to Japan's institutional ‘familism’: the development of social policy that has been explicitly connected to the male-breadwinner model. We argue that a wide range of institutional and policy practices – mortgage provision, property ownership, social security and taxation and labour market mechanisms – has combined to define the housing asset status of women. We discuss the women's current housing asset portfolio, and also recent socio-economic changes that have begun to redefine their position in a home-owning society. The case of Japan – a patriarchal but shifting home-owning democracy – contributes to our understanding of the contemporary dynamics of women's interaction between family, work and housing in the institutional context.

This article presents findings from a three-year government-funded study of the work and family lives of four important groups within the childcare workforce in England: residential social workers in children's homes, family support workers, foster carers and community childminders. The study used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, including biographical narrative interviews. The policy context of the Children's Workforce Strategy is discussed, focusing particularly on the government's aim to develop greater integration between different types of work with children and the creation of a more flexible childcare workforce. The article then draws together findings from the study to argue that although the planned integrated qualifications framework may assist mobility within the childcare workforce, other factors also need to be taken into account. The choice to engage in particular types of childcare work is often linked to factors such as life stage, preferred age of child, preferred working environment and the worker's own background and needs. This suggests the need for more targeted recruitment, matching people to type of work, and for more attention to be paid to the connections between work and family life. The study does provide some evidence of transferable skills and movement over time between types of work with children, and demonstrates the importance of seeing the life-course as presenting opportunities for childcare employment rather than being an obstacle.

Research into public policy and public opinion demonstrates ample evidence that opinion affects policy, but relatively limited empirical findings regarding how policy might affect opinion: a process dubbed policy feedback. Much of the literature examines aggregate reactions to policy, while related public opinion research emphasises individual findings driven primarily by party affiliation or political ideology. This article takes the research one step further, examining whether individuals' judgements of policy effectiveness contribute to their support for or opposition to government policy spending. Specifically, it examines the case of US welfare reform and public reactions to it using a national survey conducted in 2001. Findings based on multinomial logistic regression analysis demonstrate not only that people's judgements of welfare reform's effectiveness contribute to their support for government spending on the poor, but also that the reasons behind their judgements matter.

Over recent years there has been increasing policy concern in the UK about whether citizens are equipped with sufficient legal ‘know-how’. In January 2006, the Department for Constitutional Affairs, now Ministry of Justice, announced a Public Legal Education and Support Task Force to develop and promote the case for a national strategy. This comes after UK government strategies have recently been developed for both consumer education and financial capability. Drawing on empirical data, this article explores whether there is indeed a lack of awareness and confidence among the population of England and Wales in regard to legal issues. The results from the English and Welsh Civil and Social Justice Survey, a large-scale face-to-face survey representative of the population, illustrate the case for targeted as well as general public legal education initiatives.

In the debate on ‘flexicurity’, relatively little attention has been paid to how responsive traditional areas of social security have been to increasing flexibility in the labour market. This article tries to fill this gap by focusing on the Belgian pension system. In particular, it asks to what extent pension regulation in the three pillars has been adapted to the proliferation of atypical forms of employment. It does so by examining whether there are significant differences between old age protection of standard and non-standard workers. The article pursues a double research strategy: an analysis of Belgian legislation and relevant collective labour agreements is complemented with a statistical analysis of the Panel Study of Belgian Households (PSBH). The results show that part-time employment results in a lower first-pillar pension, while other forms of temporal flexibility such as career interruptions and temporary unemployment do not. In the second pillar, our findings suggest that workers with contractual flexibility and job mobility are discriminated against. Finally, non-standard workers do not appear to compensate for lower pension protection through increased participation in the third pension pillar. Our findings suggest the need for a re-assessment of the system of ‘assimilated’ periods. To conclude, we point to some implications for the design of flexicurity policies.

Constitutional change offers the opportunity for a major departure in the nature and direction of policy, practices and governance in social policy. This article explores some of the impacts devolution has for the discipline of social policy, suggesting that devolution matters for social policy as a field of research and study, and for the analysis and understanding of developments in UK social policy. It argues that devolution has a number of implications in terms of comparative and transnational social policy, new sites of analysis, the language of social policy, the production of knowledge and the development of new policy communities within the UK. It also signals new perspectives based on evolving welfare subjectivities and around questions of territorial justice. Drawing on discussions about the nature of social policy in the 1970s in particular, suggestions are made as to how new and emerging perspectives within and across the nations of the UK serve to ‘decentre’ the social policy tradition. In essence, this article seeks to open up a debate for ‘theorising’ the discipline of social policy through a focus on devolution.

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