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.

This study examines paid and unpaid childcare distribution connected to gender relations and inequalities. We ask: what are the gender consequences of childcare distribution in Mexico? To answer this enquiry, we apply Razavi’s diamond model, examining the social dimensions of the family/household, the State, the Market, and not-for-profit (NFP) sectors. We utilise national statistics and representative surveys from the Mexican National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), complemented with published studies on Latin America and Mexico.

The article is structured as follows. First, we provide a literature review on the model related to welfare and care provision. Second, we summarise important aspects of the Mexican context. Our analysis is structured in subsections following each dimension of the diamond. We discuss our findings through a graphic representation of the model applied to Mexico, and conclude with final remarks.

Our concrete application of the model shows how the distribution of – paid and unpaid – childcare has consequences in (re)producing and strengthening gender inequalities in a myriad of spaces, dynamics, and arrangements. Key findings indicate a reduction in public childcare provision, transferring responsibilities to the household and the NFP dimensions, enhancing gendered expectations. Additionally, there is an increased protagonism of market relations within the domestic sphere and unequal conditions for those with resources.

We contribute to current studies on gender inequalities connected to welfare systems – and the lack thereof – by offering conceptual elements to develop research pathways sensitive to context-specificities, closely aligned with countries and societies within the Global South.

Becoming a parent can affect the lives of men and women by introducing salient new social roles and identities, altered social networks and tighter constraints on financial resources and time. Even though modern family life has evolved in many important respects, parenthood continues to shape the lives of men and women in very different ways. Given that parenthood can change the lives of men and women in profoundly different ways, it seems that it would bring about changes in the way women and men think about politics and policy issues. Using data from the Wave 4 of the European Social Survey, this article investigates how parenthood, and the distinctions of motherhood and fatherhood, influence attitudes. The findings suggest that parenthood can have a polarising effect on attitudes, and that the polarising effect is most evident in countries where there is less support from the state for parental responsibilities.

The mass media is conventionally assumed to play an important role in welfare state politics. So far, however, we have very little systematic theorizing or empirical evidence of when and how the mass media reports on welfare state reforms. Building on news value theory and the welfare state reform literature, we develop a set of hypotheses about mass media reporting on welfare state reforms. We argue that mass media attention is conditioned not only by the direction of reforms, with cuts getting more attention than expansions, but also by the election platform that the incumbent party ran on in the last election as well as by the policy reputation of the government. Drawing on a new dataset including about 4,800 news articles in British, Danish and German quality newspapers from 1995 to 2014, we find supporting empirical evidence of our expectations.

Stagnating incomes have been a widespread concern in advanced democracies over the past decades. However, despite a turn towards dynamic frameworks, the consequences of stagnation on political support for the welfare state are still unclear. This study introduces the distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ income stagnation – that is, experiencing stagnating incomes over time (without reference to other groups) and in relative comparison to other groups – and explores how they shape citizens’ attitudes towards redistribution. I argue that absolute and relative stagnation have opposite effects on redistributive preferences. Contrary to political economy theories, I expect that low absolute income growth reduces demand for redistribution, because it reduces voters’ ability and willingness to afford welfare state policies. Support for this hypothesis is provided in an empirical analysis that combines novel estimates for absolute and relative income stagnation with longitudinal survey data on redistribution preferences in 14 advanced democracies between 1985 and 2018. The distinction between absolute and relative experiences has broader implications for comparative politics research and might contribute to explain why income stagnation and rising inequality have not led to higher political demand for redistributive welfare policy.

The question of whether and how federalism influences a country's welfare state has been a longstanding concern of political scientists. However, no agreement exists on exactly how, and under what conditions, federal structures impact the welfare state. This article examines this controversy. It concludes theoretically that the specific constellation of federal structures and distribution of powers need to be considered when theorising the effects of federalism on the welfare state. Using the case of Belgium and applying the synthetic control method, it is shown in the article that without the federalism reform of 1993, the country would have had further decreases in social spending rather than a consolidation of this spending in the years after 1993. In the case of Belgium, the combination of increased subnational spending autonomy in a still national financing system provided ideal conditions for a positive federalism effect on social spending to occur.

The huge quantitative literature on postwar social spending almost entirely neglected war as a possible explanatory factor of social spending dynamics. Given the mass carnage and the enormous social needs caused by the Second World War, this is quite astonishing. This article examines for the first time, whether, and in what ways, the Second World War affected cross‐national differences in public social spending of 18 Western welfare states over the course of the Golden Age. Using panel regressions, it is found that the war strongly affected social spending until the late 1960s. The evidence demonstrates that the Second World War is not simply a temporal watershed structuring different phases of welfare state development, but rather a crucial factor for understanding cross‐national differences in welfare efforts and social expenditure dynamics in the postwar period.

This article explores the causal effect of personal contact with ethnic minorities on majority members’ views on immigration, immigrants’ work ethics, and support for lower social assistance benefits to immigrants than to natives. Exogenous variation in personal contact is obtained by randomising soldiers into different rooms during the basic training period for conscripts in the Norwegian Army's North Brigade. Based on contact theory of majority–minority relations, the study spells out why the army can be regarded as an ideal contextual setting for exposure to reduce negative views on minorities. The study finds a substantive effect of contact on views on immigrants’ work ethics, but small and insignificant effects on support for welfare dualism, as well as on views on whether immigration makes Norway a better place in which to live.

Attitudes towards social spending and the welfare state have been characterised by one of the longest standing and widest gender gaps. Past research suggests that parenthood deepens this divide further. Yet, the exact relationship between parenthood and support for social policies – and the gendered nature of this process – has been difficult to establish because it can vary across welfare policy areas and the age of the children, which past studies, relying on cross‐sectional data, has found difficult to unravel. Using panel data from the Swiss Household Panel, we examine individual level changes in fathers’ and mothers’ views towards specific welfare state policies. We find that individuals’ support for social spending fluctuates at different stages of parenthood, and that mothers’ demands differ from fathers’ in relation to care related but not in terms of educational spending. This implies that parents are not a homogeneous group that parties could target with uniform electoral pledges. As a result, building widespread electoral support for expanding a broad range of social investment policies is likely to be challenging in a context where, first and foremost, self‐interest appears to drive (or depress) individuals’ support for specific welfare state policies.

In this study we show that on different dimensions of social security (compensation level, maximum duration and eligibility criteria), respondents in Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom prefer their governments to compensate unemployed immigrants less generously than unemployed natives, even after considering potential prejudices about work ethics, job experience, etc. We add to the extant literature in several ways. Based on survey experiments, we identify a strong economic component in welfare chauvinistic sentiments across the three countries. Chauvinism is negatively related to the income level of both immigrants and the respondents. We also find that low income reinforces the effect of chauvinism, a phenomenon we refer to as ‘intersectionality’. Furthermore, by comparing the preferences in the experiments with the actual welfare schemes, we find that the respondents are more generous than their respective governments regarding the level of compensation for natives as well as immigrants. When the comparison is between respondents’ preferences and actual welfare policies rather than between treatment groups, the respondents appear to be more welfare inclusive than welfare chauvinistic.

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.

This symposium makes a first step in bridging the emerging eco-social debate and the established political science theories and concepts, indicating the mutually beneficial analytical perspectives and common research pathways that may arise. In addition to identifying several aspects in the policy, politics and polity dimensions that appear to be particularly relevant in view of the emerging eco-social policies, this collection of articles points out two cross-cutting themes, namely the transformation of the welfare state set-ups, and new cleavages and power relations, which pose new questions and open a promising research agenda for political scientists.

In The Political Economy of Human Happiness: How Voters’ Choices Determine the Quality of Life, Benjamin Radcliff considers a wide variety of data from North America and Europe and argues that, on balance, welfare state policies make people happier. In short, there is a positive correlation and a causal relationship between happiness and welfare state provisions. This is an important conclusion for anyone interested in public policy and debates about the size of government. In their reviews, Larry M. Bartels and William A. Galston take issue with Radcliff’s thesis. They challenge the relationships that Radcliff suggests exist between specific policies and happiness. Bartels challenges the way Radcliff uses his statistics to support his thesis about the relationship between happiness and specific policies as well as our ability to make generalisations from the data. Galson’s objections to Radcliff’s analysis and argument is more conceptual, and, among other things, he challenges the connection Radcliff seeks to establish between happiness and the satisfaction of human needs.