2 results
7 - Can street-level bureaucrats be nudged to increase effectiveness in welfare policy?
- Edited by Benjamin Ewert, Hochschule Fulda – University of Applied Sciences, Germany, Kathrin Loer, Hochschule Osnabrück, Germany, Eva Thomann, Universität Konstanz, Germany
-
- Book:
- Beyond Nudge
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 28 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 15 December 2023, pp 127-148
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
Street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) (for example, welfare workers, police officers, educators) interact directly and on a regular basis with citizens, and exercise discretionary power when delivering public services (Lipsky, 1980; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Such discretion at the frontline is requested to motivate civil servants to enforce policy rules (Tummers, 2011; Tummers and Bekkers, 2014; Thomann et al, 2018) and tailor their implementation decisions to local political contexts and individual circumstances (Lipsky, 1980; May and Winter, 2007). However, it may also lead to less desirable effects, such as gaps between the legislator’s intention and the way policy is delivered (Hupe and Buffat, 2014), or unequal treatment of citizens’ demands (Meyers et al, 1998; Pedersen et al, 2018; Thomann and Rapp, 2018). For instance, when implementing policy tools (for example, granting a disability benefit), frontline welfare workers may use their leeway to prioritise some citizens over others, and justify their discriminatory behaviour by arguing that some citizens (for example, those who are vulnerable, meritorious or worthy) deserve more help than others (Van Oorschot, 2000; Jilke and Tummers, 2018). Such ‘deservingness cues’ and behavioural decision biases are probably legitimised if they resonate with the personal preferences of SLBs (May and Winter, 2007; Dubois, 2010; Raaphorst and Van de Walle, 2018), their moral dispositions (Zacka, 2017), their professional norms (Evans and Harris, 2004), or if they reproduce dominant social stereotypes about different policy beneficiaries (for example, Harrits and Moller, 2014; Kallio and Kouvo, 2015; Einstein and Glick, 2017; Thomann and Rapp, 2018).
These factors also affect the way SLBs process the available information when assessing the policy beneficiaries. This is most likely to take place when they have to tackle highly complex and abundant information in a limited time frame (Brodkin, 2006; 2011; Keiser, 2009). SLBs then tend to develop their own filters to process information, based on personal values and experiences, ideology, adherence to agency goals, background, and so on (Wood and Vetlitz, 2007), thus mechanically focusing on specific pieces of information and neglecting the others. In some cases, such partial information processing may impede the consideration of relevant information and result in less effective decisions (Wood and Vetlitz, 2007). This eventually leads to a disjuncture between the targeted policy goals and the actual implementation practices (Hasenfeld, 2010).
5 - Social policies put to the test by the pandemic: food banks as an indicator of the inadequacies of contemporary labour markets and social policies
- Edited by Marco Pomati, Cardiff University, Andy Jolly, University of Wolverhampton, James Rees, University of Wolverhampton
-
- Book:
- Social Policy Review 33
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 14 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 July 2021, pp 95-114
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have shed light on structural and situational – that is, tied to the current economic crisis – insufficiencies of contemporary labour markets and social policies and their incapacity to reduce inequalities and prevent precariousness. In many countries, food banks and similar food distributions emerged very early in the crisis to support people whose living conditions had considerably worsened and were not, or not adequately, supported by existing labour markets and social policies. This took place particularly acutely in Geneva, Switzerland, where thousands of people had to queue to get food bags during the lockdown, bringing to light the largely unexpected existence of an important pocket of vulnerability and poverty in one of the richest cities in the world. This situation surprised policymakers, field actors and academics alike, and emphasised the need to collect more knowledge about this – until then widely invisible – population.
More broadly, understanding this situation requires questioning the relevance of the existing mechanisms of social protection, which rely on two main pillars in order to ensure people's welfare as far as possible: first, the labour market and the capacity to get an income from one's labour and make a living of one's own; and second, the welfare state and its ability to complement insufficient income or to compensate for absent income. Taken together, these two pillars are thought to be able to guarantee social inclusion and a decent standard of living for all members of society. The ongoing pandemic reveals the structural and situational inadequacies of both the labour market and the welfare state, and points to the conditions needed to overcome them. On the one hand, the labour market organises the matching of labour supply and demand; this is embedded in institutional rules such as labour law, collective labour agreements and labour contracts that aim at guaranteeing a minimum threshold of rights and working conditions when at work. The pandemic crisis has shed a harsh light on the number of people who do not enjoy such protection, as they are undeclared workers – that is, their employment is not declared to public authorities and they therefore do not pay contributions to social insurance or benefit from legal protection. For them, the labour contract is nothing but a private disembedded arrangement, the duration and terms of which depend largely upon the employer's goodwill. In such cases, social protection proves to be virtually non-existent.