Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘super rich’ with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one’s family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants’ own and others’ insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection.

While debate on how best to pay for social care in England continues, information about public attitudes on this issue is limited. We asked representative samples of the public whether care costs for older people should be met by the state, met by the service user or shared between state and user. We used an online survey of people aged 18–75 (n = 3,000) and interview survey of people aged 65 and over (n = 466). Respondents were given four vignettes (two home care, two residential care) and asked who should pay at different levels of user resources; and how much users should contribute when costs were shared. Fewer than one-fifth of the online sample and one-quarter of the interview sample considered that the state should meet the full costs whatever users’ resources; considerably lower proportions believed that users should meet the full costs in all cases. Two-thirds of the online sample and half the interview sample thought costs should be shared. The proportion of costs that users should contribute was relatively low (20–50 per cent, varying by user resources). The study illustrates that public views elicited through vignettes can provide evidence to inform policy on social care funding.

Introduced in the United Kingdom in 2012, Universal Credit (UC) is a welfare benefit that replaces six working-age ‘legacy’ benefits for out-of-work and low-income people. Designed with the aim of simplifying benefits and incentivising paid work, UC represents a deepening of conditionality in the British welfare state. Considering these developments, this paper quantitatively investigates the effect of UC on recipients’ life satisfaction. Data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study is analysed, primarily using a fixed-effects regression approach. Results reveal a significantly negative effect of UC recipience on life satisfaction. Robustness checks and alternative model specifications, including difference-in-differences and inverse probability weighting, confirm this finding. Additionally, mediation models give credence to the idea that UC also negatively affects life satisfaction indirectly by increasing psychological distress. Heterogeneity tests indicate that UC has a less negative effect on single parents’ life satisfaction compared to non-parents. Meanwhile, UC has a significantly more negative effect on the life satisfaction of people not in paid work (for reasons other than unemployment) than those in paid work. Discussion focuses on the potential effect of welfare conditionality specifically, and implications for future research and policy are explored.

When designing programs to assist the poor, it is important to recognize who is most in need of government assistance. Although measures of poverty are often based on income alone, poverty measures based on both income and assets provide greater precision in the analysis of this group since accumulated assets can be liquidated to compensate for temporary shortfalls in income. The current study used the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2007–2017) to analyze associations between different facets of poverty dynamics (i.e. poverty entry and exit) and its determinants. We explored differences in results based on whether poverty was measured by income alone, or income plus assets. The Cox proportional hazard regression was used to examine how demographic characteristics predicted poverty entry and poverty exit. Results indicated factors predicting poverty entry were not identical to those predicting difficulty of exiting poverty. Also, the risk of poverty entry and exit differed based on whether poverty was measured by income alone, or income plus assets. Thus, using income plus assets provides new perspectives into poverty dynamics which past research, based on income alone, did not provide. These new insights can be used to inform decisions about policies for poverty prevention and alleviation.

The increasing presence of for-profit service providers in publicly-funded eldercare has transformed care in Nordic welfare states which have a strong tradition of public care provision. Macro-level research on care policies has mainly focused on public institutions, national policies, and marketization. The financialization of eldercare has not received much scholarly attention, and existing studies mostly focus on the UK. The financialization of eldercare refers to the ways in which care is both a site of profit extraction and financial engineering. The Nordic system is relatively universal, and, with rapidly ageing demographics, there is a secured demand for eldercare services. However, these services have been heavily marketized over the past two decades, opening up lucrative possibilities for financialized actors who have established a stronghold over the markets. We analyse these processes through selected empirical examples from Finland, and argue that the financialization of eldercare in the Nordic context demands attention as we are witnessing a new configuration between the constitutional order of the welfare state, public finances, and private profit which is neither transparent, nor democratic.

In many Western countries local welfare agencies retain large responsibilities in the practical organisation of means-tested support. While this may lead to substantial differences in the application trajectories of prospective claimants, what has garnered little empirical research is how local agencies use their discretion to implement practices that may encourage or discourage take-up. In addition, we know little on the extent to which variation in local implementation is attributable to differences in local conditions. Focusing on Belgium as an interesting case, this article addresses this gap by mapping the variation in local implementation practices in specific aspects of social assistance that are relevant in terms of limiting non-take-up. We assess whether certain local political, socio-demographic or economic characteristics favour implementation practices, using structural equation modelling on custom-collected data on the practical organisation of social assistance application trajectories in 119 Belgian municipalities. The results show that local welfare agencies implement coherent practices regarding information provision, accessibility, trust and the locus of initiative in the claiming process. We find the political orientation of the municipality and the share of foreigners in the municipality to be related with, respectively, shifting the locus of initiative away from the welfare claimant and a focus on information provision.

Child protection systems monitoring is key to ensuring children’s wellbeing. In England, monitoring is rooted in onsite inspection, culminating in judgements ranging from ‘outstanding’ to ‘inadequate’. But inspection may carry unintended consequences where child protection systems are weak. One potential consequence is increased child welfare intervention rates. In this longitudinal ecological study of local authorities in England, we used Poisson mixed-effects regression models to assess whether child welfare intervention rates are higher in an inspection year, whether this is driven by inspection judgement, and whether more deprived areas experience different rates for a given inspection judgement. We investigated the impact of inspection on care entry, Child Protection Plan-initiation, and child-in-need status. We found that inspection was associated with a rise in rates across the spectrum of interventions. Worse judgements yielded higher rates. Inspection may also exacerbate existing inequalities. Unlike less deprived areas, more deprived areas judged inadequate did not experience an increase in the less intrusive ‘child-in-need’ interventions. Our findings suggest that a narrow focus on social work practice is unlikely to address weaknesses in the child protection system. Child protection systems monitoring should be guided by a holistic model of systems improvement, encompassing the socioeconomic determinants of quality.

Informal caregiving for older family members is increasingly recognized and encouraged by public policies. This is even more the case in familialistic countries such as Austria. This article aims to examine the role of the family in the care culture of a familialistic care regime through the experiences of care dyads combining upwards intergenerational family care and formal care services. The analysis is based on framework analysis of 48 face-to-face interviews, almost all conducted separately, with 24 care dyads of older care users (average age 86 years old with moderate to high care needs) and their main informal carers in Austria combining formal and informal care. A quarter of caregivers and care receivers were male. We identified four different ideals (family care, preferences, involvement, gendered care) which were distributed across different groups of Socio-Economic Status (SES) and described by women and men.

The discourse of deservingness has been mobilised against certain groups in the UK society navigating UK labour markets, among them refugees and asylum seekers. These discourses, leading to the stigmatisation of the unemployed are coupled with an emphasis on the importance of individuals taking responsibility to develop their ‘employability’. Little attention has been paid to scrutinise the contrast between the deservingness rhetoric and policy making with the actual conditions newcomers, and in particular refugees and asylum seekers, are confronted with when seeking employment. Our paper fills such a gap by indicating key contradictions at the heart of labour market integration in the UK. On the one hand, the emphasis on deservingness is coupled with policy discourses that construct an environment shaped by welfare and labour market chauvinism. On the other hand, the policy architecture is fundamentally flawed in a number of ways in terms of the support mechanisms necessary to ensure that newcomers can successfully integrate into the labour market.

Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes.

The marketisation of European home care has given rise to significant private for-profit providers growth. However, little research has focused directly on commercial companies to examine the mechanisms through which they emerge, grow and shape long-term care policy – this is this paper’s task. Drawing on the literature on business power, the recent concept of “institutional business power” is introduced, defined as the power flowing from the entrenched position of business actors in the provision of public social services. The paper identifies the mechanisms through which private providers have grown and assesses the extent of their institutional power by examining their influence on policy and the support they obtain from relevant home care stakeholders. The limits of providers’ institutional power are also discussed. The paper relies on semi-structured interviews with representatives of public, private and non-profit home care providers.

This article investigates the impact of NPM reforms on two prominent welfare state professions; medical doctors and teachers. The case study context is Sweden, where the impact of NPM led to a series of reforms in health care and education after 1990. The focus in the paper is on professional autonomy, which can be seen as a core trait in professional work. The findings in the article point to both medical doctors and teachers having lost professional autonomy as a result of NPM-reforms, particularly with regards to the dimensions of work organization and evaluation. Autonomy in individual decision-making seems to have been least affected, even if there are indications of this being infringed upon as well. Despite these broad similarities, the loss of autonomy is found to be more pronounced in the case of teachers. One reason behind this difference, which manifests itself in teachers having become subject to higher level of direct administrative control by school managers while at the same time experiencing a more distinct loss of autonomy to evaluate their work, appears to be that medical doctors have been more successful in establishing themselves as experts in relation to new public audit agencies.

Previous studies have documented that crisis trends are associated with negative changes in healthcare satisfaction. Yet, most research has focused on the role of self-interest and little is known about the ideological dimension of these changes. The article investigates this underexplored topic by examining the ideological divide in satisfaction with healthcare in two countries strongly hit by the recent economic crisis, Portugal and Ireland. The results of the empirical analysis based on the European Social Survey data from 2008 to 2015 show that ideology played a role in shaping healthcare satisfaction in both countries. In Portugal, healthcare satisfaction declined more for the left- than for the right-oriented, while in Ireland the right-oriented demonstrated a stronger decline in satisfaction than the left-oriented. In addition, the results identify an interaction between ideology and self-interest, showing that ideology trumps self-interest among the low income, but the opposite is true among the high income groups. Overall, these findings suggest that there is a substantive ideology-driven dimension in public satisfaction with health systems and point to the need for theoretical integration of different approaches in the analysis of healthcare attitudes in the crisis context.

Employment subsidies are important active labour market policy (ALMP) tools, suited to a variety of labour market challenges. This paper engages with recent ALMP categorisation debates by appraising Cronert’s (2019) recent typology of employment subsidies. It uses empirical material to assess the typology’s explanatory power and produce insights to inform further typological development. The illustrative case of the British ‘Wage Incentive’ (2012-2014) is used to assess the typology’s analytical purchase. Cronert’s typology helpfully identifies key distinctions in the distributional profiles of employment subsidies, but further understanding of the category is impeded by the practice of defining them as demand-side interventions. The paper argues for a reappraisal of their supply-side characteristics, maintaining that the (potential) worker should be included in the analysis, and that employment subsidies’ relationship with training and job creation should be acknowledged. It proposes a redefinition of employment subsidies reflecting their real-world use, and suggests a framework for further exploring varieties of employment subsidy design from the perspective of beneficiaries.

There is a large discrepancy in European countries between the measured impact of immigration on the welfare state and how this impact is perceived by citizens. This study examines the determinants of individuals’ perception of the impact of immigration on the welfare state. A number of hypotheses at both the individual and contextual level are tested using a multilevel model with data from the European Social Survey. I find that the institutional features of welfare states are associated with different views on the impact of immigration on welfare states: generous contributory social welfare benefits are associated with more favourable attitudes about immigrants, while generous non-contributory benefits, by contrast, are associated with more pessimistic assessments about the fiscal impact of immigration. I argue that this can be because the latter potentially signals to natives that migrants could access generous benefits without any requisite work history. At the individual-level, the results indicate that subjective risk and general opposition to immigration are powerful individual-level predictors: people who feel more economically insecure or who are generally opposed to immigration are more likely to think that it constitutes a burden for the welfare state.

Trans people1 – those whose gender identity does not match that assigned to them at birth – are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, reflecting their marginalized legal, bureaucratic and socio-economic status2. Recent substantial international expansion to the medico-legal rights afforded them operates in tension with cisnormative welfare structures. Based upon a Critical Discourse Analysis of interviews with 35 trans people with experience of homeless in Wales, UK, alongside 12 workers in the system, I argue that anti-discrimination legislation is insufficient in its current form to prevent discrimination against trans people. I suggest that, without addressing deeper structural cisnormativity, service provision for trans people experiencing homelessness and other forms of social marginalisation will remain inadequate. This argument rests upon the following findings. (1) Failing to consider exclusion at a structural level leads to system-gaps and misunderstandings, producing poor service experiences. (2) The specific needs of trans applicants are under considered in system planning, reducing scope for meaningful homelessness interventions. (3) An equalities approach can produce a reductive and potentially pathologizing focus upon trans identity, diverting from specific individual needs. I conclude that provision of inclusive services necessitates consideration of the impact of deep cisnormative assumptions in service design and delivery, and their resultant exclusion of trans people.

Although reduced working time and furlough policy initiatives are widely regarded as important for economic and business reasons, little is known about their impacts on workers’ mental health at the onset of COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the UK Household Longitudinal Panel Study data from 2018 to February 2020 and April 2020 and change score analysis, this study aims to compare mental health changes between those who worked reduced hours, were furloughed and left/lost paid work. The results suggest that at the onset of COVID-19 reduced working time and furlough can protect workers’ mental health, but only for men not for women. The gender differences remain significant even after controlling for housework and childcare responsibilities at the onset of COVID-19. These results highlight the importance of distributing paid work more equitably and formulating gender-sensitive labour market policies in protection of workers’ mental health.

The role of street-level bureaucracy in social policy has been taken up by two relatively distinct streams of research, based on Lipsky’s foundational work (2010). One group of literature has focused on the organizational working conditions, practices and coping mechanisms of street-level bureaucrats, their impact on the implementation of political programs and reforms, and the scope for discretion in the face of political pressures and institutional demands (Brodkin and Marston, 2013; Jessen and Tufte, 2014; Breit et al., 2016; Van Berkel et al., 2017; van Berkel, 2020). Starting from a focus on interaction with clients and the direct impact of discretionary decisions ‘on people’s lives’ (Lipsky, 2010, 8), a second group of studies has focused more on differences in allocation of benefits caused by perceived ‘deservingness’ and discrimination among street-level bureaucrats (Altreiter and Leibetseder, 2014; Terum et al., 2018; Jilke and Tummers, 2018).