This study analyses how care regimes in South Korea, the United Kingdom, and Sweden shape the roles of and support policies for informal caregivers within long-term care systems for older adults. South Korea considers informal caregivers both as resources and co-clients, but its well-being support is limited, financial aid criteria are relatively strict, and while employment-care reconciliation policies exist, familistic culture hinders their use. The United Kingdom assigns co-worker and co-client roles, offering well-being support, broader financial aid, and expanding employment-care reconciliation. Sweden prioritises formal care and recognises informal caregivers as co-clients, placing the strongest emphasis on improving their well-being while strictly regulating financial aid and employment-care reconciliation. Despite differences, all three countries emphasise informal caregiver well-being and have established frameworks for financial support and employment-care reconciliation policies. Future policies should enhance quality control, regulate financial aid, strengthen employment-care reconciliation support, and expand formal care, while addressing the potential negative impacts of dual caregiver roles.

The pandemic of Covid-19 exposed critical gaps in social policy and underscored the foundational role of families and households in both societal and economic stability. This introductory chapter to a Special Issue explores the interdependence between formal economic participation and unpaid domestic labour – collectively referred to as ‘social reproduction’. Drawing on feminist political economy, the chapter addresses how gendered and undervalued reproductive labour is essential to economic growth and the realisation of international commitments such as the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly gender equality and inclusive growth. This Special Issue uses South Korea as a comparative case study due to its unique economic trajectory, rapid demographic ageing, stark gender inequalities, and limited social protection systems. The country’s long working hours, low fertility rate, and pronounced wage and care burdens on women illustrate how inadequate social reproduction support can threaten broader social and economic sustainability. The pandemic further intensified these issues, disrupting institutional supports and deepening inequalities. This Special Issue collectively examines how policies across different contexts either alleviate or exacerbate the tensions between productive and reproductive labour, using South Korea as a focal point for comparison. This comparative analysis highlights the need for structural reforms and cultural change to support effective social reproduction policies, emphasising that gender-equal leave, accessible childcare, and shared caregiving responsibilities are crucial for work-family balance and social well-being. South Korea’s experience illustrates both progress and ongoing challenges, offering valuable lessons on the limitations of market-driven approaches and the importance of resilient, state-supported family policies.

Over the years, cultural and linguistic diversity in schools across Europe has significantly increased due to migration and refugee flows. In response, international organizations, such as the Council of Europe and the European Commission, advocate intercultural education as both an educational strategy and a social policy tool to foster inclusion, address inequality, and build cohesive societies. This study contributes to the intercultural education literature by addressing an underexplored area: the process of translating intercultural policies into school practices. Using Street-Level Bureaucracy theory and qualitative research in Trento, Italy, it highlights the mechanisms and challenges shaping teachers’ practices and the extent of the policy–practice gap. Furthermore, the research also contributes to the Street-Level Bureaucracy theory. It shows that teachers can act as innovators in the policy implementation process. By engaging civil society members, notably students and members of migrant communities, as co-implementers, teachers reshape policy ecosystems through participatory and bottom-up approaches.

Latin American and South European countries share a common policy legacy of public Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pension systems, yet reform paths taken over the past decades between and within the two regions have varied. Latin American countries opted for the full or partial privatization of their public pension systems, yet subsequent reforms have challenged the public–private mix. Meanwhile, countries in Southern Europe opted for a less radical path, entailing different degrees of reform of their public pillars and the introduction of supplementary private ones. Our analysis focuses on Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay – in Latin America – and Spain, Italy, and Greece – in Southern Europe – and the reforms implemented since 1990. In understanding reform variation, we argue that by focusing on the role of political institutions and policy legacies, it is possible to identify reform mechanisms.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused widespread disruption to early childhood education and care services worldwide, affecting children’s well-being and placing unprecedented caregiving burdens on families. This paper compares the childcare-related social policy responses in three countries representing distinct welfare regimes: South Korea (Productivist/East Asian), France (Conservative-Corporatist), and the UK (Liberal). Focusing on four key domains – ECEC services, family leave, work environment, and financial support – it examines how each country addressed childcare challenges during the pandemic. The findings show that, while some similarities emerged in responding to shared challenges, the policy responses diverged considerably. These differences were shaped not only by pandemic-specific health strategies but also by pre-existing welfare structures and childcare systems. France utilised its strong public infrastructure and introduced special childcare leave; Korea expanded temporary family leave and financial aid while relying heavily on informal care; and the UK prioritised employment protection with limited direct caregiving support. The study underscores the importance of institutional flexibility and multi-layered care systems in building crisis-resilient childcare policies.

This study explores the moderating role of women’s political empowerment in addressing child poverty across European Union (EU) countries, using macro-panel data from 27 EU countries between 2006 and 2023. The study investigates how key socio-economic factors – such as unemployment and government expenditure as mitigating factors – interact with women’s political empowerment in affecting child poverty. The findings show that the political empowerment of women mitigates the negative effects of high unemployment and enhances the impact of public spending. However, no significant moderating effect was observed for early school leaving and income inequality. The study highlights the importance of women’s political participation in shaping inclusive policies for child welfare, especially in contexts of high unemployment or limited public spending. By empowering women politically, policymakers can foster environments that better target child poverty through tailored interventions and improved social policies, offering valuable insights for breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty.

Since its inception in 2009, Argentina’s Universal Child Allowance (AUH) has become the country’s most comprehensive social protection policy for children, emphasising standardisation and objectivity. However, its implementation occurs in contexts of poverty and inequality, leading to uneven outcomes across communities. This study examines how street-level bureaucrats adapt large-scale policies like the AUH to local contexts marked by deep social disparities. Although the AUH is designed for standardized and automated implementation, frontline workers play a critical role in adjusting the policy to specific territorial needs. These bureaucrats employ informal strategies and policy improvisation to mitigate institutional weaknesses and address gaps in the AUH’s rigid framework. By analysing the interplay between the policy’s institutional design, frontline workers, and adaptations, this study sheds light on how street-level bureaucracies at multiple levels enable these workers to navigate local challenges and partially compensate for broader institutional fragility.

This article posits that the multi-level governance literature can benefit from administrative burden theory if scholars are interested in understanding under which conditions policy implementation fails. To support this argument, we build on these two bodies of research to examine how implicit welfare rescaling – where the central government expands its role in a previously devolved policy – may increase administrative burdens for claimants, and to what extent local welfare systems can help to mitigate these burdens despite lacking coordination. To address these research aims, we assess the implementation of the “Ingreso Mínimo Vital,” a national minimum income scheme introduced in Spain within a fragmented regional system. Qualitative fieldwork with frontline professionals and policy experts shows that welfare rescaling heightened claimants’ administrative burdens due to inter-institutional misfit among governance levels. This imposed substantial learning, compliance, and psychological costs on claimants, making frontline professionals essential for guiding them through these challenges.

Housing informality has emerged across developing and developed societies amid the global housing crisis. This article presents an intra-national comparative analysis of informal housing interventions in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, two major Chinese cities, to investigate the policies and discourses of urban housing informality and the factors shaping different governance regimes. A critical policy discourse analysis was conducted on official documents addressing subdivided units in Hong Kong and urban villages in Guangzhou between 2010 and 2023. The analysis focuses on policy goals, interventive measures and state-market-society relations, revealing that despite similarities between subdivided units and urban villages, government interventions differ significantly. The Hong Kong government has adopted a regulatory-welfare-mix model, whereas the Guangzhou government has pursued a developmental approach to address the phenomenon. This article contributes to policy studies by comparing informal housing intervention approaches and analysing the within-country divergence of normative goals and policy levers under different sociopolitical contexts.

The varieties of capitalism thesis suggest high-income democracies cluster into distinct types, with complementarities between political, economic, and social institutions shaping long-run cross-national differences. Although featuring strongly in the comparative political economy and social policy literatures, criminal justice has received relatively little attention in this debate, but some have suggested penal policy variations map against varieties of capitalism ideal types. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis – and data for 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over a 25-year period – we explore connections between cross-national differences in penal punitiveness and key institutional features identified in these debates. We find that the degree of punitiveness strongly overlaps with varieties of capitalism ideal types, arguing criminal justice regimes constitute a dimension of institutional complementarity in varieties of capitalism.

Governments in both England and Korea prioritise a comparable set of childcare policies and strategies to promote young children’s development and wellbeing and maternal labour market participation. This paper compares the two marketised childcare systems and policies and their impact on family outcomes in the context of public policy aims to increase maternal employment. Despite Korean financial support for its childcare system being proportionally much greater than England’s, maternal employment rates in England far outstrip those in Korea. As our conceptual approach, we adopt Kagan’s (Kagan et al.; Kagan with Landsberg) application of systems theory to childcare systems. Important aspects of these two marketised systems and their infrastructure appear to be operating inefficiently, impeding equitable access to high-quality, sustainable provision. This evidence fails to explain, though, lower maternal employment levels in Korea, where a lack of active labour market policies coupled with socio-cultural factors form additional barriers. Both countries may be close to tipping points in childcare policy development. Extending childcare support beyond working families and curbing market operations may need considering in England, while in Korea expanding high-quality universal childcare support through public and not-for-profit providers and family-friendly employment policies requires addressing.

Global crises constitute challenges for social policy. While social policy is predominantly a national concern, international organisations (IOs) contribute frames of reference for state decisions. In this article, we explore whether the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in IOs’ social policy ideas and recommendations in health care, labour market, and social protection policies due to how IOs perceived the crisis’ specific nature, severity, and global scope. We focus on four IOs regarded as key actors in global social policy, namely the ILO, OECD, WHO, and the World Bank. Theoretically, we employ a framework of ideational policy change combining different levels (recommendations – including parameters and instruments – and paradigmatic ideas) with different types of change (layering, conversion, dismantlement, and displacement). We find that IOs have not fundamentally reimagined their pre-pandemic stances during the pandemic. The IOs’ perceptions of the crisis do not undermine IOs’ ideas and recommendations but highlight their appropriateness.

This manuscript compares gender equality in childcare leave policies across 21 countries and examines its relationship with gender equality in the labour market. To assess gender equality in childcare leave in each country, the duration gap and the uptake gap between genders in childcare leave are examined, and these two gaps are combined using Z-scores to measure the overall level of gender equality in childcare leave. Subsequently, the relationship between overall gender equality in childcare leave and labour market outcomes, such as gender employment and wage gaps, is explored. The results indicate that gender equality in childcare leave is generally highest in Scandinavian countries, moderate in Continental European countries, and mostly low in Eastern European countries. Furthermore, the degree of gender equality in childcare leave is negatively correlated with the gender employment gap, whereas no clear relationship is found with the gender wage gap.

Welfare state research is at a theoretical impasse insofar as it does not systematically speak to the types of social policy effort that may have not only redistributive but also productive consequences. Cautioning against imprudent use of the social investment label this paper argues for a better understanding of how traditional social policies have enabled society’s adaptation to socioeconomic changes and prevented costly experiences of poverty. Synthesizing ideas drawn from development studies in the Global South and welfare state studies in the Global North, and elaborating on the inclusive strand of welfare developmentalism, the paper conceptualizes what allows existing social policies to be simultaneously protective and productive. It reviews current welfare state research and argues that developmentalist ideas help re-centre the (re)productive role of social policy. It proposes principles for thinking coherently about what makes existing welfare state policies developmental, challenging their characterization as exclusively passive or activating. Recognizing the productive impact of existing social policies requires that we explicitly rethink how welfare state policy effort is understood.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis have raised concerns about the relevance and reliability of current measures and indices of child well-being. This article aims to bridge a significant knowledge gap by examining how these indices respond to shocks and exploring attributes of shock-responsive indicators related to child well-being. Drawing on the UNICEF Innocenti Report Card 16 on child well-being and the Korean Child Well-being Index, the study conducts a comparative analysis of differences in the design and purpose of indices that influence their resilience to shocks. Subsequently, it proposes an approach for evaluating the ‘shock-responsiveness’ of key outcome indicators of child well-being before going on to review how child income poverty measures performed during COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis. After finding that child well-being indices, at present, are not able to fully capture the effects of covariate crises on children, the article concludes with insights for policymakers and researchers.

This article explores gender inequality in work–family balance since the pandemic from a comparative perspective. It examines the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on working mothers in the UK and South Korea, particularly the factors affecting their work–family balance. It also critically analyses work–family balance policies from a gender perspective. While a number of studies have examined work–family balance issues in both countries, there has been little comparative research on working mothers’ perceptions of the way childcare/unpaid work is distributed, and few policy comparisons involving the two countries. The findings from surveys conducted in 2020 show that mothers in both countries not only did more unpaid work but encountered challenges in balancing work and family during the pandemic. This article argues that policies must be further developed to promote equal sharing of paid and unpaid work between men and women.

The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

Informal social protection systems (ISPs) continue to play a significant role where government-sanctioned social security measures do not reach vulnerable populations. Despite their essence and utility, they remain marginalised in social policy, theory, and practice, and thus many call for their integration. However, research has often overlooked factors embedded in the integration process particularly how these can affect the future performance of ISPs if they are to interact with formal systems. Adopting an argumentative conceptual approach, and a synthesis of social policy literature on ISPs, we provide a framework for managing relationships with actors to optimise the interaction between ISPs and formal social welfare systems through a conceptual framework that utilises design thinking and community development principles. We outline three essential conditions for effective engagement with ISPs to achieve social impact, urging government and others to engage with empathy; treat communities as equal collaborators; and keep a social justice focus.

In this study, we focus on European immigration attitudes in the perspective of deservingness perceptions and political orientation. Our data are conducted from the European Social Survey (2016) database, which contains 21 European countries and 39,400 participants. We used the multilevel method to study the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. The results demonstrate that the more negative deservingness perceptions are, the more negative immigration attitudes more likely become. Moreover, country-level political orientation moderate the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. Deservingness perceptions have a greater role in explaining immigration attitudes on countries with political left-context, which gives us a new perspective to understand the public debates about immigration.