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.

This paper analyzes some aspects of the third sector’s involvement process in the provision of public social services. Using evidence garnered in previous research based on in-depth interviews, I offer elements toward an assessment of the consequences this process has produced not only in terms of the gains and losses it has produced for social policy, but also for the very identity and constitutive characteristics of the third sector. The evidence hereby compiled strengthens skepticism toward the hypothesis that sees a transformative potential in the role of the third sector in social policy in Latin America. This skepticism arises from issues detected by involved actors themselves and that are linked to the weakness of the sector as a whole.

The current consensus among comparative political scientists postulates that diverse democracies redistribute less than do homogeneous ones. However, whereas homogeneous democracies do redistribute more on average, diverse democracies exhibit high variation in redistributive outcomes. Why does ascriptive heterogeneity stifle redistribution in some cases but not in others? In this article, it is argued that diversity undermines redistributive outcomes when identity groups differ more starkly in their income levels. More importantly, under these conditions, the policy outcomes are not uniform: rather than general cutbacks, richer groups selectively under‐prioritise benefits and access for poorer, minority‐heavy groups while keeping their own redistributive interests protected. The result is not simply less redistribution aggregately, but a more exclusionary and regressive welfare state that prioritises the special needs of better‐off identity groups. Empirical support is found in these hypotheses using macro‐comparative panel data on multiple redistributive aspects in 22 developed democracies in the years 1980–2011. The article thus outlines a conditional and more nuanced relationship between diversity and redistributive outcomes than commonly assumed, as well as several broader lessons for research of identity politics and social policy.

East Europe’s welfare states have undergone enormous changes in the two and a half decades since Communism collapsed. After forming part of a distinctive Communist political economy for four decades, they have been restructured in market-conforming directions that re-define public and private responsibility for societal well-being. Civil society or nonprofit organizations (NPOs) and market providers have entered the welfare sphere. The present paper maps divergent trajectories of East-Central European (ECE) welfare states and those of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), focusing on persistent legacies as well as innovation, political negotiation over reforms, and the strong influence of the European Union in shaping outcomes. It shows the growing role of NPOs across contemporary ECE and FSU welfare sectors, as advocates and as service providers partnering with governments. While NPOs remain comparatively weak in post-communist states, there is remarkable convergence of democratic and authoritarian regimes around policies of government–NPO partnerships to improve welfare performance.

Party systems diverge in their levels of nationalisation. While in some countries parties obtain similar levels of electoral support in all districts, in others parties get very asymmetric electoral shares across districts. The distributive consequences of this have been seldom studied. The argument tested here is that when political parties have nationalised electorates they have stronger incentives to provide social policies that spread benefits all over the territory. This argument is tested in 22 OECD democracies for the period 1980−2006. The results show that, regardless of the electoral system in place, there is a positive relation between party system nationalisation and social spending.

Scholarship on volunteering has paid insufficient attention to how experiences of volunteering in the past affect current and future participation. The importance of this relationship is emphasized by the introduction of public policies across the globe focusing on national service programmes and community service in schools with the underlying intention of inducing ongoing pro-social behavior. Using the UK longitudinal data, this article analyzes the prevalence of persistent individual volunteering behavior over the life-course, and most importantly, the extent to which past volunteering has a causal influence on current and future participation. Strong evidence of this relationship is provided, suggesting that volunteer-stimulating policy measures—such as the UK government’s National Citizen Service initiative for all young people between 16 and 17 years of age—will have a more profound effect because they do not only affect current volunteering activities but are also likely to induce a permanent change in favor of volunteering.

In Italy, the development of the human social service field has been grounded in a peculiar type of government–third sector partnership. This article identifies the main features of such partnership and reconstructs its evolution in a long-term perspective. The main argument is that in Italy this partnership, historically based on particularism and political patronage, has gradually shifted towards a model combining market logic and participatory orientation. State regulation has been paradoxically strengthened in order to allow more transparency, freedom of choice, and effective joint planning. However, the lack of financial and technical resources exposes this new system to old style local arrangements.

This paper applies the contrast between idealist and non-idealist modes of thought to an examination and categorization of ideas and practices of voluntary action in Britain in the period from the1880s to the 1990s. In particular, the paper explores: (1) idealism and non-idealism as properties of social theories about voluntary action; (2) idealist and non-idealist social thought in voluntary organizations; (3) pro-state idealist social thought in “official” or governmental circles on relationships with voluntary action, and changes in such thought and in government relationships with voluntary action in the 1970s; (4) innovations in the ways of classifying voluntary organizations; and (5) new approaches to the study of voluntary action. The paper also comments on voluntary action and the “third way.”