This study examines how public policy and organisational characteristics relate to employer family policies, applying a theory-testing approach at the meso (employer) level. Expanding debates in comparative research on employer behaviour, we distinguish analytically between normative and economic logics and assess their explanatory relevance across policy contexts. Comparing Germany (IAB Establishment Panel) and the United States (National Study of Employers), the findings indicate that normative logics better explain employer-provided childcare, which is more prevalent in Germany, where economic pressure should generally be lower. By contrast, economic logics better explain employer-provided flexible working in the absence of public flexible-work policy. However, when examining female leadership and organised labour at the organisational level, the expected alignment between policy context and dominant logic does not always hold. Taken together, the findings show that meso-level tests of competing logics can clarify how employee segments relate to employer family policies across contexts.

Climate change is an unequal crisis, with the greatest risks and fewest resources concentrated in the Global South. This study examines whether cross-national differences in social inclusion and welfare regimes explain variation in climate adaptation readiness and vulnerability. Using a multiply imputed panel of 173 countries (1995–2020), it applies Correlated Random Effects models to assess how inclusion and welfare regimes relate to adaptation outcomes across the Global North and South. Results show that inclusive regimes are significantly associated with higher adaptation readiness and lower vulnerability, even after controlling for income, politics, and OECD membership. Results also vary significantly between welfare regimes. The findings suggest adaptation is fundamentally institutional and sociopolitical, not only technical or economic. Institutionalized inclusion functions as an “adaptation infrastructure, “suggesting that embedding social inclusion is a precondition for climate resilience.

Social investment policies have introduced a shift in the normative underpinnings of European welfare states but are layered into compensatory and workfarist policies. This article questions the normative outcomes of social investment from a citizen perspective, asking how hybrid active labour market policies (ALMPs) shape citizen-level norms of social solidarity. Building on normative feedback theory, we conduct a comparative qualitative secondary analysis of focus-group datasets from France and Belgium (2006; 2019), where enabling instruments were gradually introduced between observation points. Based on a two-fold operationalization of citizen-level norms, we report that compensatory and workfarist cues dominate discussions with scarce reference to capacitation. The frames participants rely on feature normative tensions, particularly the ambivalent coexistence of compensation and individual responsibility. The normative feedback of ALMPs takes the form of a dilemma between generous-yet-stringent solidarity. Social investment policy norms have not (yet) reshaped citizen-level norms of social solidarity.

This article examines why policy ideas emerging during crises sometimes become institutionalised while in other cases they remain unimplemented. We argue that policy responsiveness is shaped by unequal instrumental and structural power across first-tier and second-tier citizens. In South Korea, this hierarchy reflected institutional legacies of developmental citizenship, which accorded privileged status to workers in conglomerates and manufacturing production networks. Using a comparative analysis of employment insurance reforms during the 1997 Financial Crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that policy expansion occurred when crises severely affected first-tier citizens, which include export-oriented conglomerates, their integrated subcontractors, and the workers employed therein. By contrast, proposals during COVID-19 largely remained unfulfilled, as the most impacted groups, including the self-employed and non-standard workers, occupied a marginal position. This unequal responsiveness can be interpreted through a three-gap mechanism – structural presence, representation, and political participation – underscoring that the institutionalisation of policy ideas is contingent on historically embedded power structures.