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.

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.

Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. This article addresses this empirical and conceptual gap by drawing on administrative burdens literature to analyse empirical data from forty-four interviews with UC recipients. We conclude by highlighting three costs: temporal, financial, and emotional. These costs illustrate the political dimensions of technical features of UC, as they affect accountability procedures and paths to legal entitlements that have bearings on certain claimants’ rights.

Content analysis is a valuable tool for analysing policy discourse, but annotation by humans is costly and time consuming. ChatGPT is a potentially valuable tool to partially automate content analysis for policy debates, largely replacing human annotators. We evaluate ChatGPT’s ability to classify documents using pre-defined argument descriptions, comparing its performance with human annotators for two policy debates: the Universal Basic Income debate on Dutch Twitter (2014–2016) and the pension reforms debate in German newspapers (1993–2001). We use the API (GPT-4 Turbo) and user interface version (GPT-4) and evaluate multiple performance metrics (accuracy, precision and recall). ChatGPT is highly reliable and accurate in classifying pre-defined arguments across datasets. However, precision and recall are much lower, and vary strongly between arguments. These results hold for both datasets, despite differences in language and media type. Moreover, the cut-off method proposed in this paper may aid researchers in navigating the trade-off between detection and noise. Overall, we do not (yet) recommend a blind application of ChatGPT to classify arguments in policy debates. Those interested in adopting this tool should manually validate bot classifications before using them in further analyses. At least for now, human annotators are here to stay.

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.

This paper evaluates the UK Government’s decision to increase the main form of social security by £20 per week during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, exploring whether increasing the generosity of social security for some, but not all, claimants affected food insecurity. Using the Family Resources Survey, we found a decline of about 7 percentage points in food insecurity amongst benefit claimants affected by the uplift compared with claimants not affected (95% CI −13.9 to −0.9%). This association did not change substantively following adjustment for covariates, nor when the model was re-estimated using matching methods. Results were not driven by changes in the composition of claimants over time. These analyses suggest food insecurity could be reduced if the generosity of the social security system increased. In actuality, the UK government went in the opposite direction, removing the £20 uplift in October 2021, potentially exposing claimants to higher rates of food insecurity again.

Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.

Universal basic income (UBI) is becoming a prominent alternative to reform the welfare state, yet public support for this policy remains a puzzle. Existing scholarship empirically shows that certain groups like the low-income and left-wing show support, but it remains unclear if this translates to a preference for UBI over alternatives. This paper argues against this assumption: UBI challenges welfare norms and deservingness principles, suggesting people would typically prefer means-tested options. Drawing on a conjoint experiment, this paper empirically shows supportive evidence of the idea that support for a UBI does not translate into an inherent preference for UBI. These findings have widespread implications for both the UBI literature and the politics of welfare reform.

By 2025, over eight million UK households will be receiving Universal Credit (UC). Introduced in 2013 to simplify the benefit system and improve work incentives for working age adults, UC has been criticised for causing hardship and exacerbating inequalities. There is limited research on children and young people’s (CYP) views of UC, as well as its health and social impacts. In this pilot qualitative study, creative methods were used to understand the views of UC among CYP (n = 40) aged 12–16 years in North East England. Findings showed diverse and nuanced understanding of UC as well as contested views about conditionality, sanctions, lower UC rates for under-25s and the two-child limit alongside recognition of the stigma and shame associated with benefits. While CYP value paid employment, they stressed the importance of minimum income standards and tailored employment support for UC claimants, taking account of their personal, health and family circumstances. Findings suggest CYP are aware when parents and carers are struggling financially and may try to ease pressures on parents. Debates about principles of equality, fairness, social justice and deservingness were present in young people’s accounts. We conclude by exploring future directions for a CYP-centred approach to social policy.

The social protection of platform workers is considered one of the most precarious features and political challenges of this new form of employment. Still, there have only been a few empirical investigations on this issue to date. This article presents an explorative empirical analysis of the social protection of platform workers in Germany – a conservative welfare regime with a strong link between standard employment and institutionalised social protection. On the basis of an online survey amongst 719 self-employed platform workers, we examine how different employment patterns correspond to institutionalised protection against sickness and old age. We empirically explore different protection types and analyse how they differ regarding working conditions in platform work and individual social policy preferences. Findings reveal that conditions of platform work and social protection as well as demands and regulatory preferences vary notably across different clusters of platform workers. Still, the vast majority votes against obligatory social insurances for platform workers and favours self-employment over dependent employment. Against this background, we discuss challenges for future attempts aiming at improving social protection for platform workers. This study adds to the literature by empirically exploring platform workers’ social protection and social policy preferences, which have been overlooked to date.

Over recent decades it has consistently been shown that disabled adults in the UK fare worse in the labour market and have lower levels of wellbeing than non-disabled adults. However, this is in part due to the selection into dis-ability of those with existing socio-economic disadvantages. In this article, we use panel data from the combined British Household Panel Survey and Understanding Society, covering the 27 years from 1991 to 2018, to distinguish between the effect of selection, the effect of dis-ability onset and the effect of dis-ability duration on a range of labour market and wellbeing outcomes. We show that there is important selection both into dis-ability and into longer experience of dis-ability on the basis of observable characteristics. We also show the importance of controlling for time-invariant unobservable individual characteristics that similarly affect selection into dis-ability and duration of dis-ability. Even after controlling for both forms of selection, we find significant negative effects of dis-ability onset and duration, and offer policy solutions to address them.

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.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both viral infection and the corresponding economic turmoil have wreaked havoc across the globe, highlighting the imperative function of the state as a social protection provider. The pandemic has seemingly created favourable political circumstances for rapidly expanding social protection, but its influences on public welfare attitudes remain unclear. In this study, I argue that the impact of pandemic-driven economic risk is too limited to spur strong public support for social protection. The employed empirical analyses using panel data collected in South Korea show that unemployment induced by the pandemic is conducive to higher degrees of individual support for social protection measures, but the impact is only short-lived. Further analyses show that, once individuals are re-employed and as the time spent in economic difficulties becomes more distant, personal unemployment experiences are no longer positively associated with support for social protection. Finally, pandemic-induced unemployment experiences have a lasting impact primarily on young adults. The evidence therefore suggests that significant institutional changes in the welfare state are hard to achieve by solely relying on the impact of economic risk.

Rectifying the imbalance of theorisation of education expansion focusing on its benefits, this study examines the relationship between education expansion and income inequality by turning our attention to its risky aspects. We investigate how expanding education might not effectively mitigate income inequality, because it brings about costly and risky competition for the positional value of education. We consider welfare regimes as relevant institutional factors associated with educational positionality based on the similarities between two environmental conditions that make education positional and two underlying dimensions of welfare regimes (de-stratification and commodification). We analysed higher education cases in twenty-four to twenty-five developed countries from 2000 to 2020. Our results show that higher education expansion initially reduced income inequality, but the reducing effect was attenuated, and eventually, it increased income inequality when higher education was positional, corresponding to the countries with a liberal regime and two East Asian countries such as Japan and Korea.

The UK government has called for employers to make work adaptations in response to changes in health individuals may experience as they age. However, government assumptions place too much emphasis on the voluntary actions of employers and managers, without placing the management of health in a wider context. Drawing on insights from Thompson’s disconnected capitalism thesis, we explore whether financial/competitive pressures facing many private and public sector organisations today, alongside other factors, contribute to organisations not considering or implementing work adaptations. In this context, it is suggested that older workers may also hide health issues because of anxiety, or ‘ontological precarity’, regarding working longer. Qualitative case studies compare the delivery of work adaptations in three organisations: ‘Local Government’, ‘Hospitality’, and ‘Trains’. Work adaptations were only widely available in Trains; this was for a range of reasons, including the fact that Trains was relatively insulated from financial pressures and able to deliver job and financial security for older workers. As many older workers will continue to be employed by organisations similar to Local Government and Hospitality, we argue that policy makers cannot rely solely on employers to make adaptations.

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.

Crises create opportunities for policy change, yet the extent to which they encourage redistribution is under-researched. We adopt a narrative approach to study how crisis frames are mobilised to support or oppose redistribution, and whether that redistribution is progressive or regressive. A typology of crisis narratives with different redistributive implications is presented: retrenchment narratives promote deregulation and cuts to welfare; Robin Hood narratives advocate progressive redistribution with expanded rights; and restoration narratives favour bringing back the status quo ex ante. We apply the Narrative Policy Framework to examine how Australian parliamentarians used the language of ‘housing crisis’ during and after COVID-19. Despite existing research suggesting crisis narratives mostly support retrenchment, Australia’s pandemic housing debates were dominated by Robin Hood and restoration narratives. We show that party ideology matters for the redistributive content of crisis narratives, but the effect of ideology is mediated by incumbency status. We conclude that shifts in the parliamentary balance of power lead to changes in political parties’ rhetorical support for redistribution.

As climate change progresses, natural hazards are projected to continue to increase in frequency and intensity, posing a new form of social risk, implicating both the welfare and environmental state and raising the salience of ecosocial policy as a mechanism to attend to the distributional effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This study posits a novel conceptual framework for ecosocial policy and offers the US ecosocial safety net as a case analysis. While we conceptualise disaster relief policy as a mode of the environmental state, it includes unique ecosocial policies that constitute the backbone of the US ecosocial safety net. This study describes and compares the developmental and functional synergies between the US welfare and environmental state manifested in the form of an ecosocial safety net by explicating the Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program. Our findings reveal synergies between US disaster relief and welfare, including parallel developmental trends, philosophies of deserving/undeserving, functions of racial capitalism and relationships with economic growth. This study and its conceptual framework of ecosocial policy offer a groundwork for the study of ecosocial policy in other contexts.

A substantial international body of evidence links housing to health outcomes. In 2021, the World Health Organisation (WHO) evaluated a small selection of policies from its six geographic regions and found that, in Australia as in the rest of the world, existing healthy housing measures fall short of the systemic response required to address health impacts and inequities. This paper takes the novel step of applying Bacchi’s (2009) ‘What is the Problem Represented to Be?’ approach to a wide-ranging thematic analysis of over 300 Australian policies across the domains of health and housing and related policy areas. In so doing, it offers an overview of existing healthy housing policy as well as illuminating the conceptual understandings and priorities of policy makers, shedding light on the policy paradigms that see housing under-utilised as a preventive health and health equity measure.

The increasing use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds for state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) programs in the United States (U.S.) has raised concerns about the diversion of TANF funds for purposes not directly aligned with TANF’s core objectives. This study investigates whether states’ allocation of TANF funds to state EITC programs reduces the overall income of both current and former TANF recipients and potentially widens changes in the poverty gap. Changes in the poverty gap are calculated by subtracting the poverty gap at time t−1 from that at time t, where the poverty gap is defined as the difference between 50 percent of the state median income of households with children and the average income of TANF recipients. This study employs panel data from all fifty states spanning 2008–2016 and utilises fixed-effects estimation. Empirical findings suggest that states’ utilisation of TANF funds to support state EITC programs does not have a statistically significant effect on changes in the poverty gap for TANF recipients. This study proposes that TANF fund diversion may reflect states’ efforts to pursue poverty reduction, particularly given the inconclusive evidence regarding TANF’s anti-poverty impact.