This study investigates how support for Social Europe is related to citizens’ welfare attitudes. On the one hand, welfare attitudes can spill over from the national to the European level, given that Social Europe aims to achieve similar goals to those of national welfare states. On the other hand, support for the welfare state can be an obstacle, if citizens perceive the nation state and the European Union as competing or substituting governance levels. Using data from the 2014 Belgian National Election Study, we take a multidimensional approach to Social Europe, capturing attitudes toward social regulations, member state solidarity, European social citizenship, and a European social security system. Results demonstrate that citizens who are more positive about the welfare state are also more supportive of Social Europe. However, positive welfare attitudes do not affect all dimensions of Social Europe to the same extent. The spillover effect of support for basic welfare state principles is strongest for policy instruments of Social Europe that are less intrusive to national welfare states (EU social regulations). By contrast, welfare state critique has a stronger impact on support for more intrusive instruments (European social citizenship).

The relationship between Holyrood and Westminster is an evolving one where there is some evidence of policy divergence. Underpinning policy approaches are different views of social citizenship, with the Holyrood approach maintaining elements of the post-1945 welfare settlement. The place of refugees and asylum seekers within these differing approaches is currently underexplored. This article looks at the Scottish and UK Governments’ views of social rights and how they apply to asylum seekers and refugees. It suggests that despite refugee ‘policy’ being at least partly reserved, the Scottish Government has been able to take a different approach from that of Westminster, an approach underpinned by these differing welfare outlooks.

This article examines both the place of the social dimension in past and on-going debates about the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union and the reciprocal influence of EU and UK institutions on developments in the social policy field. It explores fluctuations in the relationship between economic and social policy, the divisiveness within, between and across political parties, the role of key policy actors in shaping the social agenda, and the failure of attempts to harmonise social welfare systems as enlargement intensified their diversity. We argue that, although difficult to predict, the implications of Brexit for future social policy in the UK and EU may not be so far-reaching as in some other policy areas, due largely to the maintenance of unanimous voting and the subsidiarity principle in many social domains, combined with the shift towards soft law and the widespread resistance of member states to tighter social integration.

The focus in welfare state support in the Netherlands has been shifted from workfare and activation policies to social investment strategies. The discourse on basic income and the related municipal experiments highlights this shift. We address the inspiration found in basic income and behavioural economic and motivational psychological theoretical insights for the design of the experiments and for new avenues of minimum income protection and providing participation opportunities for the disadvantaged. The emerging new paradigm also implies a shift in the cultural values and principles on which welfare state policies are implicitly founded. This means that in these endeavours particular social values are put more upfront, such as personal autonomy (capacitating people by providing opportunities and therewith ‘free choice’) and trust (activating people by putting trust in their self-management capacities) which in day-to-day policy practice means more tailor-made, demand-oriented integrated mediation and coaching while rewarding people instead of penalising them.

The analysis of EU level social and gender policies highlights uneven developments and concerns over the EU as not (always) beneficial to social progress and gender equality. The EU, although primarily market driven, has developed a range of social policies, with gender equality enjoying a long-standing status as EU's founding value, dating back to the 1957 principle of equal pay for equal work. Yet, sixty years later, social justice objectives and equality between women and men remain to be realised. Social and gender themes have been revived by the proposal to develop the European Pillar of Social Rights, the shaping and implementing of which post-Brexit UK will not take part in. This initiative entails some meaningful developments for social and gender progress. However, its current form and content represents an adjustment to, rather than a transformation of, the unequal European economy and society.

Two factors have boosted the debate on Basic Income (BI) in Spain in recent years: on the one hand, the combination of welfare budget cuts and growing poverty rates has spread claims for a radical reform of Spanish welfare policies; on the other hand, the emergence of Podemos as a new key actor in the Spanish political arena has generated a vivid discussion on BI and income guarantee proposals. By reviewing the political debates on these proposals, I will argue that economic feasibility concerns and implementation problems are closely related to their political feasibility. Significantly, the radical rejection of ‘means-testing’ by BI defenders fails to grasp the different types and degrees of conditions that an income guarantee system may establish. The main lesson from the Spanish experience is that BI supporters should be ready to compromise and accept generous means-tested guaranteed income programs as stepping-stones.

Distribution of public resources has always been a central issue in public policy. The question of spatial variation in resource allocation as a reflection of differing local conditions is particularly important in decentralised countries with a large number of subunits. On the local level, studies have shown variations in distribution of local welfare but have usually focused on single social policy fields and/or target groups, and often ignored territorial structures. By taking Estonia as a case, this study investigates whether and how the distribution of a range of social services and the structure of disaggregated local social spending corresponds to local socio-demographic conditions. We identify municipal clusters and analyse service provision and social spending on vulnerable groups within them. We use a spatial perspective by taking into consideration the distinction of rural-urban and core-peripheral settings. We show that resource allocation in Estonian municipalities mirrors quite well local socio-demographic structures but the division of municipalities between towns and rural municipalities used in the common discourse of local social policy is too simplified.

The social investment approach has been advocated as a blueprint for recasting European welfare states since the years of the Lisbon Strategy. After the Euro crisis squeezed the fiscal space available for welfare recalibration, the question has been raised as to whether social investment could withstand the economic turmoil. Relying on a new welfare expenditure dataset constructed from various Eurostat sources, this article looks at the budgetary recalibration of 27 EU welfare states from the launch of the Lisbon Strategy to the aftermath of the Euro crisis (2000 to 2014). It compares the financial efforts that governments have put into social investment- and social protection-oriented policies, highlighting the different trajectories taken by EU welfare states at the crisis crossroads. Four scenarios for welfare recalibration are put forward, based on the social investment perspective and its critiques. The results show that the overall progress made by social investment in welfare budgets since 2000 came to a halt with the outbreak of the crisis. Bleaker scenarios materialised, whereas EU welfare states pursued retrenchment rather than investment, or had to face harsher budgetary trade-offs, expanding social investment to the detriment of social protection.

This study examines the conceptualisation of family in key social legislative documents guiding social workers in two European countries, whose welfare systems have previously been labelled as re-familialised (Lithuania) or de-familialised (Sweden). The focus is on the concept of family as delineated on three legislative levels: the constitutional level, the general family policy level, and the child welfare policy level. ‘Family’ is explicit in Lithuanian law, and the regulation of family formation and responsibility is imperative, while this is much less so in Swedish law. The analysis reveals how general welfare systems (regime-types) are linked to legislative frameworks, which, in turn, provide fundamentally different conditions for social work in different contexts.

To what extent, in the context of severe economic crisis, do governments of the right and the left have room for manoeuvre to choose their fiscal consolidation paths? To what degree might this margin be broader in multilevel systems? The severity of the crisis suffered by Spain since 2007, combined with the significant scope of the powers and related expenditure capacities of the Autonomous Communities, make the Spanish regions a highly suitable case for controlled comparisons of fiscal adjustment policies and welfare reforms. Specifically examining healthcare retrenchment in the regions, we find that although the regional governments were all subjected to considerable budget constraints and were forced to cut social policies, they were also able to ensure a certain degree of leeway in selecting their individual healthcare retrenchment policies, in part by strategically utilising the multilevel institutions provided by the Spanish Autonomic State.