Over the past two decades, the emphasis on paid work has become one of the defining features of social security policy in the UK. Lone mothers and their families have been one of the key groups affected. In this article we focus on the working and family lives of lone mothers and their children over time, drawing on material from a long-term qualitative research study, and setting this in the context of policy developments. We explore the long-term consequences of trying to sustain work, and manage low-income family life as children grow up and needs change over time. This highlights some of the tensions and limitations in family support and relationships when resources are limited. We reflect on the links between insecurity, legacies and the state.

As basic income (BI) has ascended the policy agenda, so proposals have come under increasing scrutiny for their affordability and adequacy for meeting need. One common objection to BI has been that it is impossible to design a scheme that simultaneously conforms to these two criteria. In this article, I develop a conceptual framework for analysing the trade-offs that afflict BI policy design. I suggest that while the idea of a policy dilemma between affordability and adequacy does indeed afflict ‘full’ BI schemes, it is possible to design an affordable and adequate ‘partial’ BI scheme. However, this comes at the cost of (at least partly) forfeiting some key advantages that motivate interest in BI in the first place, since these only arise as a consequence of the elimination of means testing and related conditionality from the welfare system. Thus, BI proponents face a three-way trade-off in policy design between affordability, adequacy, and securing the full advantages of BI as a radical simplification of existing welfare policy. The trilemma is illustrated with reference to original microsimulation evidence for the UK, which demonstrates that at most two of the three criteria can be achieved in a single scheme.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is seen as a crucial element of the social investment state. Whilst the extent of social investment in ECEC depends on financial expenditure, its effectiveness depends on certain conditions being met: namely, affordable, high quality provision being available. We explore policy development and the role played by government in the funding, provision and regulation of ECEC in England, France and Germany and then compare availability, affordability and quality. We argue that for children aged three and over, social investment can be deemed to be broadly effective in France and Germany, but in England quality is compromised by low staff qualification levels in private childcare centres. For children under three, effective social investment is elusive in all countries, although as a result of different conditions not being met. Our findings lead us to question the limitations of the concept of social investment in ECEC, particularly in marketised contexts.

There is a burgeoning literature that suggests that, across a number of social policy domains, ‘Scotland is different’. Hitherto however, race equality policy has been largely overlooked and this article addresses this within the context of recent and historical developments in a devolved policy context. Adopting a mixed-method case-study analysis, including thirty-two semi-structured interviews with civil society and Scottish Government, the article shows how policy actors lack a consensus on the underlying causes of racial inequality, in ways that may impede policy making. In this sense, the article shows how Scotland ‘orbits’ around existing settlements, rather than necessarily setting off in a new course that goes beyond the fact of contingency. The implications of this analysis have a much broader relevance, including an account of how race equality policy opportunities encounter political obstacles, in a way that bears both specific and generalizable qualities. These include the role of policy coalitions in holding and promoting a coherent set of positions, the particularity of race as an idea or ‘cognitive problem’, and how prevailing narratives about national identities can feed into this process.

Despite the centrality of shame and stigma within research on welfare in high-income countries, these issues only exist within the periphery of rapidly expanding practice in and research on social assistance in low- and middle-income countries. This oversight undermines social assistance’s potential in breaking the poverty-shame cycle and ignores its role in the (re)production of shame and stigma. This article offers a critical exploration of the role of social assistance in alleviating or reinforcing shame and stigma in low- and middle-income countries. Findings indicate that positive and negative effects co-exist but that far too little evidence is available to judge whether social assistance receipt overwhelmingly negates or plays into shame and stigma, particularly in low-income countries. Greater awareness of the interface between social assistance, shame and stigma, explorations of policy options that minimise or counter stigmatisation, and critical engagement with ideological and political discourse underpinning design and delivery of interventions represent crucial steps to move towards ‘shame proofing’ social assistance in low- and middle-income countries.

Drawing on participatory research with people living in poverty, this article details the possibilities inherent in this research tradition and its particular applicability and as yet often unrealised potential for poverty and social security research. The dominant framing of ‘welfare’ and poverty foregrounds elite political and politicised accounts, which place emphasis on individual and behavioural drivers of poverty, and imply that the receipt of ‘welfare’ is necessarily and inevitably problematic. A large body of academic evidence counters this framing, illustrating the extent to which popular characterisations are out of step with lived realities. What is often missing, however, are the voices and expertise of those directly affected by poverty and welfare reform. This article argues that placing experts by experience on poverty at the centre of research efforts is best understood as constituting a direct challenge to the marginalising and silencing of the voices and perspectives of people living in poverty. While this hints at participatory research’s great potential, it is vital also to recognise the inherent challenges of taking a participatory approach. Significantly, though, participatory research can undermine popular characterisations of poverty and welfare and provide opportunities for alternative narratives to emerge, narratives which could contribute to the building of a pro-welfare imaginary over time.

In many developed countries lone parent families face high rates of child poverty. Among those lone parents who do get child maintenance there is a hidden problem. States may retain all, or a proportion, of the maintenance that is paid in order to offset other fiscal costs. Thus, the potential of child maintenance to alleviate poverty among lone parent families may not be fully realized, especially if the families are also in receipt of social assistance benefits. This paper provides an original comparative analysis exploring the effectiveness of child maintenance to reduce child poverty among lone parent families in receipt of social assistance. It addresses the question of whether effectiveness is compromised once interaction effects (such as the operation of a child maintenance disregard) are taken into account in four countries Australia, Finland, Germany and the UK using the LIS dataset (2013). It raises important policy considerations and provides evidence to show that if policy makers are serious about reducing child poverty, they must understand how hidden mechanisms within interactions between child maintenance and social security systems can work as effective cost recovery tools for the state, but have no poverty reduction impact.

Evaluation studies of active labour market policy show different activation measures generate contradictory results. In the present study, we argue that these contradictory results are due to the fact that the outcomes of activation measures depend on other institutions. The outcome measure in this study is the long-term unemployment rate. Two labour market institutions are of special interest in this context: namely, employment protection and unemployment benefits. Both institutions, depending on their design, may either increase or decrease the effectiveness of active labour market policies in lowering long-term unemployment. Based on an analysis of macro-level data on 20 countries over a period of 16 years, our results show that employment protection strictness and unemployment benefit generosity interact with the way in which active labour market policies relate to long-term unemployment. Our results also indicate that, depending on the measure used, active labour market policies fit either in a flexible or in a coordinated labour market. This suggests that active labour market policies can adhere to both institutional logics, which are encapsulated in different types of measures.

This study examines what motivates an organization representing a religious-national minority to provide social services. The case study for examining this issue is the Islamic Movement in Palestinian society in Israel, and specifically its social activities in the town of Kafr Qassim. The article analyzes the factors leading to the development of the movement’s various services in the town by tracing their historical development and current offerings. This case study analysis is informed by two theoretical bodies of knowledge: the development of NGOs and the development of faith-based organizations. The data is based upon 17 semi-structured in-depth interviews with the heads of all the social services, social activists and municipality representatives in Kafr Qassim, where the movement was established. Some of the interviews also include tours and observations of actual services provision. Additional sources include archival documents, such as the organization’s regulations and work plans. The findings identify three main factors in the development of minority religious organizations: government failure in providing services (necessary factor) and religious ideology and mobilization of political support as secondary factors. All three are grounded in the ongoing conflict between the Palestinian minority group and the state.

This study contributes to the international literature on welfare dynamics, by providing a differentiated picture of paths through the means-tested Basic Income for recipients who are capable of working, after the reorganisation of the basic income system in Germany in 2005. We analyse the employment and benefit trajectories of individuals who became recipients for the first time between 2007 and 2009 by methods of sequence and cluster analysis based on representative administrative individual data. We find a significant polarisation between long-term recipients and those with an early exit from benefit receipt via full-time employment. One in three new recipients remains in benefit receipt for the next years and shows almost no employment activities. Approximately 23 percent leave benefit receipt quickly and work in full-time employment. Several other different paths exist between these two poles. These heterogeneous trajectories should be characteristic for broad basic income systems and require a variety of policies that in part are beyond labour market policies.

Policy discourse surrounding Britain’s unusually well-resourced private schools surrounds their charitable status and their relationship with low social mobility, but informative evidence is scarce. We present estimates of the extent to which private and external benefits at age 25 are associated with attendance at private school in England in the 21st century. We find a weekly wage premium of 17 percent, and a 12 percentage point lower chance of downward social mobility. By contrast, private schooling is not significantly associated with participation in local voluntary groups, unpaid voluntary work, or charitable giving and fundraising; this finding casts doubt on claims that private schools deliver ‘public benefit’ in this way.

Using data from Understanding Society and the British Household Panel Survey, this article explores the relationship between working part-time and progression out of low pay for male and female employees using a discrete-time event history model. The results show that working part-time relative to full-time decreases the likelihood of progression out of low pay, defined as earning below two-thirds of the median hourly wage. However, part-time workers who transition to full-time employment experience similar rates of progression to full-time workers. This casts doubt on the idea that part-time workers have lower progression rates because they have lower abilities or work motivation and reinforces the need to address the quality of part-time jobs in the UK labour market. The negative effect of working part-time is greater for men than for women, although women are more at risk of becoming trapped in low pay in the sense that they tend to work part-time for longer periods of time, particularly if they have children. Factors such as childcare policy and Universal Credit (UC) incentivise part-time employment for certain groups, although in the right labour market conditions UC may encourage some part-time workers to increase their working hours.

Although the German economy managed the last economic recession comparatively well, it suffers from high and stagnating long-term unemployment and benefit receipt. This article is the first to study the duration and determinants of welfare benefit (“unemployment benefit II”) receipt in Germany as a whole, with special attention on duration dependence. The recipients of the means-tested household benefit are not necessarily registered as unemployed, but are, for example, employed with insufficient earnings, in training measures or economically inactive. Due to the heterogeneous situations of welfare recipients, separately studying welfare receipt and unemployment is necessary. By using exceptionally rich administrative data on a 1% random sample of welfare recipients from between 2005 and 2014, we estimate discrete-time hazard rate models that control for unobserved heterogeneity. The first benefit and unemployment episodes for first welfare recipients between 2006 and 2012 (n = 26,163) are traced monthly until 31 December 2014. Recipients leave unemployment more quickly than welfare. Sociodemographic characteristics, labour market resources and the duration seem to affect both processes. Household composition is less important for leaving unemployment than for leaving welfare. Overall, the results indicate that leaving unemployment and leaving welfare receipt are two different processes that need distinct policies.

The availability of paid family leave has been widely researched in the context of a two-parent household with one mother and one father, yet few studies have explored whether households with same-sex parents have access to equal benefits. Expanding on previous cross-country comparisons of parental leave policies, this study examines parental leave policies in 34 OECD countries to compare the total duration of paid parental leave available to same-sex and different-sex parent families within a country. We find that same-sex female and different-sex couples receive equal durations of leave in the majority of countries. However, same-sex male couples often receive shorter durations of paid parental leave compared to both different-sex and same-sex female couples. In addition to addressing the implications of laws and policies surrounding same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption on parental leave availability, we highlight specific aspects of paid leave policies that may explain the unequal durations of paid leave between same-sex and different-sex couples.

This paper argues that analyses of the gendered character of welfare states should be broadened to include women’s share of board and executive roles, as well as the affirmative-action policies (e.g. gender boardroom quotas) that help to overcome the gender stereotypes (e.g. women are ‘nice’, men are ‘assertive’) and opaque selection procedures at the root of this. Such indicators may seem beyond the remit of social policy analysis, which is concerned foremost with the analysis of ‘social risk’. However, drawing on evidence from across multiple disciplines, this paper argues that achieving a ‘critical mass’ of women in board and executive positions can bring women’s issues onto companies’ agendas and lead to the adoption of female-friendly practices, policies, and cultures at the firm level. Crucially, these practices, policies, and cultures can help to reduce the incidence of gendered social risks (employment/care conflicts, economic dependence on a partner) and sexual harassment among women at lower levels of the labour market. Thus, the paper highlights another dimension to the social-regulatory function of welfare states which has to date been overlooked, namely legislative requirements on companies to achieve gender diversity in their leadership structures.

Modern welfare regimes rest on a range of actors – state, market, family/households, employers and charities – but austerity programmes diminish the contribution of the state. While changes in this ‘welfare mix’ require support from the population, attitude studies have focused mainly on people’s views on state responsibilities, using welfare regime theory to explain differences. This paper contributes to our understanding of the welfare mix by including other providers such as the market, the family or employers, and also introduces social risk theories, contrasting new and old risks. Regime theory implies differences will persist over time, but risk theory suggests that growing similarities in certain risks may tend to promote international convergence. This article examines attitudes to the roles of state, market, family, charity/community and employer for pension and childcare in Germany and the UK. We collected data using deliberative forums, a new method in social policy research that allows citizens space to pursue extended lightly moderated discussion and permits researchers to analyse people’s justifications for their attitudes. Our research indicated patterns of convergence especially in preferences for childcare, but that regime predominates in people’s justifications for their attitudes: regime differences in attitudes are resilient.

This article applies the concepts of the financial-subject and micro-foundation of financialisation to young workers’ experiences with Hong Kong’s financialised pension regime. The results of our qualitative analysis show that many respondents doubt and belittle their financial investment for retirement. In response to the compulsory investment required by the government and the fact that their aspirations for security in later life seemed unfulfilled, some young workers undertook ‘uninformed’ investment and ‘age-led’ risk taking. The findings also show that employment precarity translates into investment precarity owing to workers’ unstable incomes and contributions; labour inequalities are reflected in financial inequalities. Arguably, the neoliberal crafting of the young financial-subject, including constructions of financial irresponsibility, irrationality, and illiteracy, is fraught with tensions, turning workers into investors and using finance to satisfy socio-economic needs. It contributes to social policy studies by connecting selfhood and institutions, and calls for questions about the future of financialised pensions.

The fact that equitable social policy expanded drastically in Latin America during the left turn and during a time of prosperity does not necessarily mean that the ideological color of governing parties and economic growth are the engines behind changes in social policy, as is usually claimed by part of the literature. Using panel data from Latin American countries for 1990–2013, this paper offers an alternative explanation, derived from previous qualitative research, that the level of political competition, the strength of civil society, and wealth are the key factors behind the expansion of equitable social policy. Once these explanations are included in our models, the ideological leaning of governments and economic growth lose statistical significance. Thus, this paper challenges dominant approaches that consider social policy change in Latin America a consequence of the ideological leaning of the government and economic growth.

Contemporary welfare policies in many Western countries limit public assistance for the long-term unemployed and spur rapid movement into the labour market. These policies have substantially changed the trade-offs of employment and welfare-use behaviour, making employment far more attractive than welfare dependency. Despite this new reality, many welfare recipients circulate in and out of the welfare system and the low-wage labour market or become disconnected from both work and welfare. Drawing on longitudinal administrative data of single Israeli mothers who received Income Support Benefit in 2003, this study focuses on the role of structural factors, including local labour market conditions and local availability of subsidised child-care, in explaining the intensity of welfare receipt over a 51-month period. The results indicate notable diversity in welfare-use accumulation. Some mothers were classified as short- to mid-termer recipients while others showed a much more intensive use, and about a third were classified as chronically dependent. Local labour market conditions and their change over time played an important part in explaining welfare accumulation, while local child-care availability had no effect. Implications for policy are discussed.

The article suggests that self-reflexive participation should be considered a distinct form of client participation. Self-reflexive participation is an individualized form of participation that occurs through a development-oriented dialogue between the client and a practitioner. In this dialogue, clients reflect on themselves, set goals for the future and devise strategies, thereby improving their self-regulatory potentials. The article discusses important differences between self-reflexive participation and democratic, consumerist and co-productive participation in terms of the form participation takes, the aim of participation, the client role, the resources required from clients to participate, the assumed relationship between the agency and the client and organizational responsiveness. Self-reflexive participation is based on a view of the client as capable and reflexive and it may foster a tailoring of social services to the wishes and life-projects of clients. However, self-reflexive participation is based on the assumption that clients can be empowered through improved skills of self-observation and life-planning. When focus is on these skills, it may gloss over important conflicts between clients and agency and detach questions of client participation from organizational responsiveness and struggles over user control.