This article explores the interplay between business elites and the Argentine state in shaping social policy from the late nineteenth century until 1943, focusing on the sugar industry in Jujuy. It asks why sugar industrialists introduced welfare measures in their mills during the 1930s and what social conditions shaped their choices. We argue that limited assistance initiatives, introduced following the Great Depression, allowed mill owners to justify tariff protection while reinforcing their dominance over workers and curbing union influence. These measures, rooted in the sugar elites’ control of provincial politics and sustained intervention in the state apparatus, exemplify early forms of private–public cooperation in welfare provision. By tracing the evolution of state–business interaction in social provision, the article demonstrates how local industries shaped welfare regimes before the rise of Peronism, offering new insights into the diversity of policy responses and social realities in Argentina and Latin America.

How does technological change affect social policy preferences? We advance this lively debate by focusing on the role of dual vocational education and training (VET). Existing literature would lead us to expect that dual VET increases demand for compensatory social policy and magnifies the effect of automation risk on such demands. In contrast, we contend that dual VET weakens demand for compensatory social policy through three non-mutually exclusive mechanisms that we refer to as (i) material self-interest; (ii) workplace socialization; and (iii) skill certification. We further hypothesize that dual VET mitigates the association between automation risk and social policy preferences. Analyzing cross-national individual data from the European Social Survey and national-level data on education systems, we find strong evidence for our argument. The paper advances the debate on social policy preferences in the age of automation and sheds new light on the relationship between skill formation and social policy preferences.

The article examines the tax policies the UK Labour government pursued in its first year in office in the context of its economic and fiscal inheritance. It presents the promises of the 2024 Labour Party Manifesto and the government’s main tax policies to June 2025. The article considers several possible interpretations of the government’s tax policies including the desire both to raise revenues and to establish fiscal credibility and assesses whether tax measures have been used to address social policy goals. The article concludes that, while cautious and even conservative, Labour’s approach to tax and tax policy making did not appear to be based on a cohesive plan, was not accompanied by a coherent or compelling narrative, and failed to seize the opportunity for a bolder strategy.

Business management education is increasingly making use of artificial intelligence as an emerging technology that will lead to major societal changes in learning and knowledge endeavours. This editorial article focuses on the link between business management and artificial intelligence as an enabler of social policy changes. This means considering the history of artificial intelligence and how business management education has evolved in recent years. By doing so, it encourages more focus on creative uses of social policy in terms of discussion about educational initiatives. This is helpful in gaining more insight into the novel and entrepreneurial ways business management education can embed artificial intelligence and improve overall learning outcomes.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the ensuing increased concerns over energy prices, have created new controversies in the European political discourse over how to pursue an energy transition that can reconcile economic, environmental, and social objectives. In this context, this paper examines public opinion priorities and potential trade-offs across social groups regarding the need to combat climate change, ensure energy supply, and protect household disposable income. Using a conjoint survey experiment embedded in a cross-national survey conducted in December 2022, at the peak of the ‘energy crisis’, we first examine citizens’ preferences for alternative policy packages to respond to situations that vary among three conflicting dimensions: the climate and energy strategy pursued by national governments, different kinds of social compensation measures, and financing mechanisms. Second, we explore how these preferences vary across ideological leanings, socioeconomic groups, and vulnerability profiles related to environmental degradation and policies mitigating the effects of climate change. Our findings indicate that synergies exist between ecological and social goals: support for renewable energy investment increases when policies include social transfers and progressive financing mechanisms. However, partisan and socioeconomic divides make this multidimensional policy issue politically challenging. Policy solutions that combine renewables investments with social compensation are attractive to left-leaning individuals and to the pivotal group of centrist voters. However, low-income production workers who fear job loss tend to remain opposed to the energy transition, even when compensation is provided. This result highlights the trade-offs and political dilemmas that (left-leaning) parties face when navigating the energy transition.

Recent scholarship has emphasized methodological innovations to mitigate preference falsification in public opinion data, yet systematic scrutiny of bias in regression analyses remains limited. Drawing on analyses of political trust in China, we offer three key insights. First, determining the direction of social desirability bias in regression estimates—whether over- or underestimation—is challenging ex ante. Second, analyses of two nationally representative Chinese surveys, one incorporating a list experiment, cast doubt on the purported positive effect of social welfare expansion on political trust. Extending beyond social welfare and the Chinese case, we find similar biases when regressions rely on direct questions. Third, we show that certain identification strategies can partially mitigate regression bias when direct questions are unavoidable.

Housing issues are a growing global concern and a key topic on the European policy agenda. Across EU, challenges such as immigration, economic stagnation, inequality, and ageing populations exacerbate housing provision issues. This growing concern demands effective solutions, guided by research, data-driven insights, and comparative analysis. This study overviews and compares housing provision in the EU countries. Using OECD and Eurostat data from 2010 to 2021, we examine governments’ roles in housing provision and assess availability, affordability, and adequacy, while exploring their interrelationships. Through hierarchical cluster analysis and cartographic visualization, we identify clusters of countries with similar housing characteristics. The findings reveal significant variation, with some countries struggling with availability, others with affordability or adequacy. Our results highlight a clear divide in housing challenges between Eastern, Western, Southern, and Northern Europe, largely aligning with welfare state regimes.

Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis‐conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty‐first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working‐ and middle‐class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle‐ and working‐class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle‐class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working‐ versus middle‐class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.

This article uses cross‐national data to examine the effects of fiscal and political decentralisation on subnational governments’ social expenditures. It revisits the benefit competition hypothesis put forward by fiscal federalism research, which posits that subnational governments in decentralised countries match welfare benefit reductions by their peers to keep taxes low and avoid an in‐migration of welfare dependents. As a consequence, subnational social expenditures are assumed to plateau at similar and low levels. Using a new cross‐national dataset on social expenditures in 334 subnational units across 14 countries and 21 years, the author explores whether benefit competition causes subnational governments to converge on similar levels of social spending. The analysis reveals that as countries decentralise, subnational social spending levels begin to diverge rather than converge, with some subnational governments reducing their social expenditures and others increasing them. Furthermore, decentralisation is not likely to be associated with lowest common denominator social policies, but with more variability in social expenditure. The article also examines the effects of other macro‐level institutions and demonstrates that policy coordination influences the relationship between decentralisation and subnational social spending levels.

Although the welfare state is a core theme in most national elections in Western democracies, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the causes of welfare state pledge‐breaking. This article presents an argument that explains when governments do not do what they promised and tests it using an innovative research design with data covering four decades and 18 countries. The argument is able to account for several important but, until now, undescribed phenomena. First, nowadays, governments, on average, deliver less welfare than they promised, whereas in the 1970s they used to deliver more than promised. Second, the pledge‐breaking of governments has become highly dependent on the parliamentary opposition's position on the welfare issue. When the opposition favours fiscal and economic responsibility, governments’ tendency to deliver less welfare than promised is amplified. In contrast, when the opposition emphasises the positive benefits of generous welfare, such as equality and social justice, governments become more prone to keep their promises. Third, this conditional effect of the opposition is a recent occurrence that only emerged after the number of potential swing voters increased as class‐based voting gradually declined from the 1970s onwards.

Increasing societal heterogeneity, changing demographics, and increasing public debt and fiscal constraints have recently challenged traditional “regime” approaches to welfare state development. Some scholars argue, against this background, that welfare states might plausibly move out of their “regime container” by opting in favor of similar solutions and responses. This potential trend toward “convergence” might, furthermore, be facilitated by the widespread use of new public management ideas and techniques for “reinventing government” by adopting market solutions to public problems. This article investigates whether such trends of convergence can be identified by comparing three different countries each traditionally looked upon as belonging to different welfare state regimes: Denmark, Germany, and the United States. More specifically the article looks at one important segment of welfare state activity, namely social services and related health care. To further focus the analysis, special attention is devoted to the changing role played by the third sector in delivering services. The research design, thus, differs from most comparative welfare state research. Instead of analyzing a broad set of quantitative indicators in a large number of countries, it is scrutinized how some of the same problem pressures and policy ideas are being interpreted and implemented in a small number of countries within one policy area. The analysis reveals that trends of convergence—conceptualized along four dimensions: ideas, regulation, mix of providers, and revenue mix—can be identified across the three cases, though this does not mean that the market share of nonprofit providers becomes the same. The study also reveals that fundamental aspects of state–nonprofit relations persist despite trends of convergence.

This article seeks to unravel the dual realities represented by the juxtaposition of the recent series of harsh regulatory impositions on Russian nonprofit organizations and the nearly simultaneous enactment of a series of laws and decrees establishing an impressive “tool box” of positive support programs for a large class of the so-called socially oriented Russian nonprofit organizations. To do so, the discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the article documents the considerable scale of the Russian NPO scene as it is visible through the lens of available empirical research. Next, it outlines the key policy measures affecting nonprofit organizations (NPOs) put in place by the Russian government beginning in the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century. Unlike some accounts, however, this one brings into focus both the interesting “tool box” of support programs for NPOs enacted during this period as well as the more restrictive regulatory measures, such as the “foreign agents law,” that also came into force. Finally, the article seeks to unravel the puzzle posed by these apparently competing realities of Russian government policy toward nonprofit organizations by bringing to bear the conceptual lenses that Graham Allison formulated to make sense of the strange series of actions that surrounded the Cuban Missile Crisis a little over 50 years ago.