Despite the significant influence of localism on policy discourses in the UK in recent decades, there has been limited evidence of any fundamental changes in state-civil society relationships. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 created a new context for cross-sectoral collaboration, as the local Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) and local communities moved to the forefront of the crisis response. This paper draws upon 49 semi-structured interviews with local authorities (LAs) and VCS organisations across England, Scotland and Wales, to explore how the pandemic has reshaped LA-VCS collaboration. Examining the evolution of a range of local collaborative frameworks during the Covid-19 crisis, the article examines what enabled these collaborations to develop, how they operated and what insights can be derived regarding both the conditions for collaboration to flourish and the capacity to sustain this going forward. The findings offer insights into what more progressive forms of collaboration might look like during the transition from crisis and into recovery. It contributes to broader debates about whether the models deployed during Covid-19 represent a pathway to more consensus-based collaboration after a decade of antagonism between civil society and the state.

Scholars have argued that negative attitudes toward government inhibit support for redistributive policies, while other studies show that individual attitudes toward the rich and the poor shape support for redistribution. How these individual attitudes relate to support for redistribution together has seldom been examined. Using the third round of the Life in Transition Survey (fielded in 2016, including 29 countries transitioning from communism) and outcome variables that tap into general attitudes about closing the income gap between the rich and the poor and willingness to pay more to help the needy, we examine how individual attitudes toward government, as well as the rich and the poor are associated with support for redistribution (final analyzed sample n > 23,700). Using logit multivariate regression analysis, we find that trust in government institutions and perceptions of public corruption are associated with certain redistributive attitudes, while individual attitudes toward the rich and the poor are consistently associated with both the general beliefs that income gaps in the country should be reduced and individual levels of willingness to pay more to help the needy.

This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth inequality and deservingness valuations regarding the wealthy affect popular support for a personal wealth tax. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between self-interest and deservingness. Using original survey data and a vignette design, we find that subjective self-interest is more important than objective self-interest, and that providing information on aggregate wealth inequality can shift the attitudes of those who are otherwise indifferent in favour of wealth taxation. Furthermore, deservingness valuations impact support for taxation in important ways. Factors indicating meritocratic wealth accumulation reduce support, and this is especially pronounced among low-status respondents. By contrast, while non-meritocratic factors increase support for taxation, these effects are largely off-set in privileged groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that self-interest and deservingness valuations impact attitudes towards wealth taxation in opposing directions, and that providing information to those otherwise indifferent might increase redistributive preferences.

Swedish welfare is often characterized as comprehensive and generous. Social assistance constitutes the final safety net in the Swedish model. Unlike most other benefits, eligibility and subsidy levels are here subject to extensive means-testing, with eligibility determined by individual caseworkers. In this article, we explore the extent to which eligibility determination and generosity of benefits have changed in social assistance assessments over three decades, relating these to changes in regulations over the same period.

The article presents data from three independent vignette studies conducted in the mid-1990s, mid-2000s and in 2018 respectively. The data consist of assessments of a total of six vignettes, made by individual caseworkers (n=1 337). The results indicate that overall generosity in social assistance has decreased considerably over the last 25 years and that, despite both national and local initiatives to reduce individual variation in assessments, disparities have instead increased.

The legitimacy of welfare state institutions is a key question in public policy research. In this study we examine population’s confidence in child protection systems, the role of institutional context and moral alignment. Analysing representative samples of survey data (N=6,043) of citizens in six European countries (Czechia, England, Finland, Norway, Poland and Romania), we find that overall people express confidence in their child protection system. Differences between populations are correlated with institutional context, i.e. the type of child protection system in place – that is, if people live in a country with a risk-oriented system or a family service-oriented system. People’s view on their moral alignment with the system (or not) only shows minor differences in support of interventions. However, a tendency towards polarisation is detected in Finland and Norway with clear differences in support of interventions that restrict parental rights: individuals who state they are in alignment with the system favour stronger interventions than those who say they are not.

Concerns about the unintended effects of marketised public employment services are increasingly expressed because there is mounting evidence that such services are frequently characterised by various gaming practices on the part of their providers. To prevent these unintended consequences, payment-by-result approaches have been progressively strengthened.

The aim of the research reported in this article was to investigate the extent to which such approaches are able to make service providers accountable for client outcomes. The study used two Italian regional cases in order to compare different and alternative contracting arrangements: Lombardy (outcome-based payments), and Emilia-Romagna (fixed payments). Drawing on rich administrative databases, the analysis relied on a quantitative methodology based on propensity score matching and logistic regressions. Even if outcome-based contracting can make service providers financially accountable for the service outcome, the results of the analysis show that it does not sufficiently prevent gaming practices, resulting in inequity among the services provided.

Retirement timing is an issue of great political importance these days. Policy-makers develop various initiatives encouraging workers to postpone retirement beyond the statutory retirement age. This effort brings, however, just minimal outcomes. Although increasing opportunities and abilities to work in old age, in some countries people tend to retire as soon as it is possible. In economic terms, they make suboptimal (irrational) decisions.

Since 1997, the Canadian province of Quebec has put in place a heavily subsidized universal childcare program for all children under the school age. The present paper examines how the level of competition among individual providers associates with the quality of childcare in Quebec. The quality of childcare is measured by the number of violations and penalties recorded in the inspections conducted by the Quebec Ministry of Family Affairs. The analysis indicates that the intensity of parental competition for daycare spots, as opposed to childcare centres’ competition to attract parents, negatively associates with the quality of childcare. Critically, this association is mainly driven by less affluent neighbourhoods. In addition, these associations are found to be stronger for more serious violations. The policy implications for both childcare quality and childcare equality are discussed.

Existing literature shows the importance of maternity leave as a strategy for women to balance work and family responsibilities. However, only a few studies focused on the long-run impact of maternity leave length on maternal health. Therefore, how exactly they are related remains unclear. We examine women’s selection into different lengths of maternity leave as a potential explanation for the inconclusive findings in the literature on the association between maternity leave and maternal health. This study aims to unravel the association between maternity leave length and mothers’ long-term health in Germany. Drawing on detailed data from the German Statutory Pension Fund (DRV), we estimated the association between maternity leave length and sick leave from 3 years following their child’s birth for 4,243 women living in Germany in 2015 by applying discrete-time logistic regression. Our results show a negative relationship between maternity-leave length and long-term maternal health, likely driven by negative health selection. Long maternity leaves of more than 24 months were associated with worse maternal health in the long run, while a positive association emerged for vulnerable women with pre-existing health problems.

This paper provides a detailed overview of how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the income of charitable organisations – an under-researched theme within social policy, which thus far has largely focused on the impact of the pandemic on individuals’ and households’ wellbeing. It analyses a unique longitudinal dataset that follows through time c.90,000 charities in England and Wales. The results, for the first time, illustrate the scale of the pandemic’s financial impact on the charitable sector: the median charity experienced a 13% real decline in annual income, while a charity at the 25th percentile of the annual relative growth distribution experienced an income decline of 43%. Importantly these annual declines are much more sizeable than those associated with the Great Recession and subsequent period of public spending austerity. Smaller charities, particularly those with an income under £100k, have been most significantly affected. The declines have been pervasive, extending across most fields of charitable activity, though certain charitable fields have seen particularly acute declines. While there has rightly been considerable emphasis on the important role of voluntary action in responding to the pandemic, this new empirical evidence helps to communicate the extent of the recent challenges faced by the charitable sector.

Looking at core features of child and family related spending and policy design, and covering five domains of policy, the paper offers new empirical evidence and an original perspective for better understanding how EU countries and the UK responded to the needs of children and families during the pandemic and how to classify responses in terms of child-centredness. The paper is driven by a concept of child-centredness to examine developments from March to December 2020 in five policy fields: income support, food assistance, early childcare and education services, school opening and support for parental care-giving. The analysis shows strong variation across countries in terms of how active they were and what fields they were active in. One very striking commonality, though, is that the most popular field of policy action was in resourcing parental care of children at home, through paid leaves usually. A related finding is that there was little prioritising of children for most kinds of actions. Thirdly, in terms of national patterning those countries that were generous spenders on this field of policy prior to the pandemic were most child-centred in their response and there are few if any exceptions to this.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected working women’s well-being in different ways due to contrasting national responses. This article focuses on the specific context of Singapore, which implemented differentiated rules for workers: essential workers continued to report to workplaces, while non-essential workers were required to work from home. This policy had far-reaching implications for working women, who are more likely than husbands to juggle paid work and household duties. The article uses longitudinal data collected in 2018 and during the pandemic in 2020, specifically during Singapore’s lockdown period, to measure changes in 287 working women’s self-reported levels of stress, fatigue, and quality of interpersonal relationships by essential worker status. While all workers were affected by the pandemic, female essential workers were more likely than their non-essential peers to report declines in stress levels from 2018 to 2020, and less likely to report changes in spousal relationships, both positive and negative. Findings suggest that the differences were driven by exposure to quarantine conditions faced by non-essential workers. Our results highlight the importance of policies supporting frontline workers and more gender-equitable labour market policies to support married women juggling the twin demands of employment and household responsibilities.

The rapid widening of wealth inequalities has led to sharp differences in living standards in Great Britain. Understanding whether and separately the rate at which individuals accumulate particular types of wealth by family background is important for improving wealth and social mobility. We show offspring wealth inequality is driven by housing wealth, and holding such wealth is becoming increasingly associated with early life circumstances relating to parental housing tenure and education, even after controlling for adult offspring’s own characteristics. Importantly, we find adult offspring whose parents hold a degree and are homeowners are no less likely to report homeownership and housing wealth compared to older cohorts from the same background. Our findings infer the intergenerational rank correlation in housing wealth is set to double in approximately three decades.

Employer family policy tends to be conceived as employers’ response to economic pressures, with the relevance of normative factors given comparatively little weight. This study questions this status quo, examining the normative relevance of public childcare and female leadership to employer childcare. Logistic regression analyses are performed on data from the 2016 National Study of Employers (NSE), a representative study of private sector employers in the United States. The findings show that public childcare is relevant for those forms of employer childcare more plausibly explained as the result of employers’ normative as opposed to economic considerations. The findings further suggest that female leaders are highly relevant for employer childcare, but that this significance differs depending on whether the form of employer childcare is more likely of economic versus normative importance to employers. The study provides an empirical contribution in that it is the first to use representative data of the United States to examine the relevance of state-level public childcare and female leadership. Its theoretical contribution is to show that normative explanations for employer childcare provision are likely underestimated in U.S. employer family policy research.

Analysis of the 2010/11 Longitudinal Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education survey shows that overly-simplistic conceptions of graduate success underestimate the value of obtaining a degree in some subjects. Using a skills-based classification of graduate jobs the research finds that maths and vocationally-oriented subjects associated with higher earnings returns (Belfield et al., 2018a, 2018b) – engineering, architecture, computer science and nursing – increase the chances of having an ‘Expert’ job compared to the average for all graduates. However, more generalist subjects that have been linked with lower earnings such as creative arts, languages and mass communication and documentation are better for accessing graduate jobs where creativity and ability to communicate is key. The research demonstrates the value of using a more nuanced conception of graduate jobs and shows that debate about the value of higher education needs to move away from a narrow focus on earnings.

Even as education becomes increasingly important for functioning in society, and many welfare states have taken responsibility for providing education, many individuals have insufficient skill levels to fully participate in society. This paper investigates the relationship between literacy skills and basic functioning and participation in society, focusing on the role of the welfare state, and whether individuals with low literacy skills are better off in terms of labour market outcomes, quality of life, digital participation and adult learning in countries with higher investments in active labour market policies (ALMPs), and three underlying spending categories: 1) public employment services, 2) training and 3) private sector employment incentives. Through multi-level analysis of 25 Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries and 139,449 individuals, using individual-level data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) and country-level data from the OECD, our results show that while low literacy is associated with less favourable conditions related to all outcome variables investigated, ALMPs do not always moderate these negative associations. This is especially true for labour market participation, health and on-the-job training. However, higher ALMP spending is associated with more favourable conditions among low-literate individuals when it comes to job satisfaction, digital participation and life-long learning.

Universal Basic Income (UBI) found its way back to media and policy agendas, presented as an alternative to the social investment policies omnipresent in Europe. In spite of the apparent appeal, however, UBI faces a discursive and political stalemate that seems hard to overcome. In an attempt to understand this tension, we explore the discursive coalitions surrounding UBI in a debate on Dutch Twitter. We use discourse network analysis to (a) cluster discussants endorsing similar positions and (b) see which political elites endorse these positions. We find that the known schism between the liberal and egalitarian interpretations of UBI is driven by ambivalence towards its redistributive implications. Moreover, we observe a turn towards social investment frames amongst UBI advocates, who centrally argue that UBI is activating and deregulating social security. This change in framing, however, seems to have little visible impact on elite coalition formation. Green-left elites remain overrepresented amongst proponents, while liberal and conservatives are opposed, and the socialist party remains divided on the issue. Thus, while the implementation of a ‘full’ UBI seems blocked by redistributive concerns, the social investment turn may be the political compromise that explains the popular appeal and political success of UBI inspired experiments.

Studies on climate change mitigation and environmental degradation suggest that lifestyle changes in high-income countries can help promote environmental sustainability. Such changes may include material sacrifices on the part of the individual. Yet, accepting material sacrifices can be a challenging task for both individuals and countries. Can publicly provided economic protection facilitate the acceptance of such sacrifices? This study examines whether social insurance generosity is likely to make people more willing to accept material sacrifices for the sake of environmental protection. Using multilevel regression modelling to analyse data on social insurance programmes and attitudes towards material sacrifices in nineteen high-income countries, the results of the study suggest that social insurance generosity has a positive effect on attitudes towards accepting material sacrifices, with some variation across programmes and social groups.

In 2018, Nigeria began the implementation of a cash transfer programme (CCT) for poor and vulnerable people. We evaluated the impact of cash transfer on household livelihood outcomes in Nigeria. Using multistage cluster sampling methodology, beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries within the same locality were randomly selected to participate in a survey to assess the impact of cash transfer on food security and food diversity.

When gender, marital status, educational status, and age were controlled, beneficiaries were about three times more likely than non-beneficiaries to report experiencing little or no hunger. Children 0–59 months of beneficiaries were twice likely to have at least three meals a day compared to children of non-beneficiaries. Difference in differences regression analysis showed that on the average, beneficiaries of the cash transfer significantly consumed more diverse food than non-beneficiaries. Beneficiaries of the CCT experienced fewer episodes of severe hunger, have more meal frequency, and higher household dietary diversity than non-beneficiaries. This shows that the CCT programme is effective and can directly mitigate adverse effects of malnutrition with its long-term negative impact on children and thus must be expanded to more vulnerable people across all states in Nigeria.

Inspectors are the executing branch of state regulation. Existing literature focuses on their tasks and operations, mostly with regard to their commitments to the state and their complex relations with inspectees. The present study explores a heretofore-unexamined issue: the playing out of inspection in a sociopolitical context of national conflict and discriminatory majority-minority relations. Namely, it focuses on the work of inspectors of social services overseen by the Israeli welfare state but provided by local or contracted agencies, offered to one of the country’s most oppressed and marginalized populations: Arab-Palestinian young women. The research was based on interviews with 25 national and district inspectors in the field of services for young women in Israel, and reveals numerous barriers hindering effective inspection, resulting from having to inspect the implementation of universalist policy in a context of local needs; and the implementation of welfare policy in a context of national sociopolitical inequality. This is discussed in terms of the severe toll that color-blind and gender-blind policy can have on the feasibility of enforcing regulation, and on the potential to ensure that Arab-Palestinian young women receive adequate social services.