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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 United Kingdom’s National Referral Mechanism (NRM) is a framework for identifying potential victims of modern slavery (slavery, servitude, forced labour or human trafficking) and ensuring that they receive adequate care. This research explores differences in referrals and outcomes of potential modern slavery victims within the NRM on the basis of individual attributes, geography and first responder. Findings are based on exploratory analysis of data on 55,000 cases released by the Home Office in spring 2022 plus data from four Freedom of Information requests. Findings confirm that there are significant differences in rates of positive outcomes between native and immigrant groups, with native populations more likely to receive positive conclusive grounds (CG) decisions. Our key contribution is in identification of the role of the first responder in negatively influencing outcomes for victims of particular forms of exploitation. We suggest the differences in outcomes may be explained by the dual role played by first responders within the immigration system in identifying victims and implementing immigration control measures. We situate this finding within a broader critical migration literature on polymorphous borders pointing to the NRM as one mechanism through which bodies are differentially excluded from territorial access and associated rights or benefits.

Social investment can act as an empowering funding mechanism that could activate the economic agency of marginalised people while addressing their social needs. Nonetheless, political agendas might cause divergence in the achievement of social investment’s potential benefits. To develop our understanding in this area, this paper aims to extract discursive policy framings of social investment by comparing the UK and Scottish Government policies to identify the use of social investment and its implications on social innovation. Using corpus linguistic methods that allows for a framing analysis, the paper’s findings are twofold. Firstly, both the UK and Scottish Governments share similarities in the framing of social investment policy, especially in the proclivity towards the privatisation of social welfare delivery using market mechanisms. Secondly, the governments differ in their intensity of conviction for social investment which creates divergent implications for social innovation practice in the countries.

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.

Multiple welfare states are re-emphasising the need for street-level bureaucrats’ (SLBs) discretion to stimulate responsive service provision. However, little is known about how SLBs with diverse backgrounds in inter-departmental settings deliberate what it means to use discretion well when different rules, eligibility criteria, and interpretations apply to a client. We address this gap by investigating the stories that participants of a Dutch policy experiment told each other to justify which clients should be granted a flexible interpretation of entitlement categories amid scarcity. We found that ‘caretakers’ used the ‘victim of circumstances’ and ‘good citizen’ plot-type to convince ‘service providers’ that the use of discretion was the right thing to do, whereas the latter used the ‘not needy enough’ or ‘the irresponsible citizen’ plot-type for contestation. Our analysis shows that storytelling helped SLBs to make sense of and bring cohesion to complex situations. Moreover, the analysis shows how stories can have a strong emotional appeal and create a sense of urgency to act collectively, yet can also create divisions and opposition among SLBs. As such, storytelling influences how SLBs think and feel about the client, themselves, and each other, and influences how discretion is used at the front-line of public policy.

Governments around the world have increasingly adopted behavioural public policies, in which behavioural insights units (often designated as ‘Nudge units’) play an increasingly important role. Such units are typically assigned with implementing behavioural insights in various social policy fields. However, research on the contextual specificities of Nudge units is still scarce. This article addresses that gap by providing an in-depth qualitative study of MineduLAB, a Nudge unit active within the Peruvian Ministry of Education. Informed by an interpretive approach, our analysis shows that the behavioural insights that MineduLAB makes use of and develops, are enacted by a unique local interplay of three different dimensions: a political-financial, an epistemic community, and a sector-specific (here: educational) dimension. Moreover, our analysis of a Nudge unit in the Global South showcases both similarities (e.g. focus on behavioural evidence and experimentation) as well as differences (e.g. the challenge of corruption; the deployment of other vocabulary with regards to behavioural insights) with the predominantly Western Nudge units that are more commonly researched. Consequently, we argue that for a profound academic evaluation of behavioural public policy and the role of Nudge units herein, it is crucial to pay close attention to their contextuality and geographical diversity.

The studies of descriptive political representation demonstrate that the share of women amongst local elected officials increases, but mayors are still predominantly men. This paper contributes to the literature on the link between the descriptive and substantive representation of women at the local level. It investigates the influence of mayors’ gender on the development of local childcare policies in Poland. We employ quasi-experimental research schemes (difference-in-differences and generalised synthetic control) to study changes in childcare provision and public spending on nurseries and kindergartens. We merged electoral data (changes on the mayoral position) and registry data on local budget expenditures and service availability covering a period of more than 16 years. We do not find any systematic causal link, suggested by the extant literature on substantive representation, between the election of a female mayor and the expansion of childcare services.

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.