Intended to simplify the benefit system and ’make work pay’, Universal Credit (UC) is the UK’s first ‘digital by design’ benefit. Proponents of UC highlight the greater efficiency and effectiveness of digitalisation, while critics point to costly IT write-offs and the ‘digital divide’ between people with the skills and resources to access digital technologies, and those without. Less attention has been paid to automation in UC and its effects on the people subject to these rapidly developing technologies. Findings from research exploring couples’ experiences of claiming UC suggest that automated processes for assessing entitlement and calculating payment may be creating additional administrative burdens for some claimants. Rigid design parameters built into UC’s digital architecture may also restrict options for policy reform. The article calls for a broadening of thinking and research about digitalisation in welfare systems to include questions of administrative burden and the wider effects and impacts on claimants.

Hong Kong society has put family-friendly workplace policies under serious discussion, but the investigation of the views of employers remains insufficient. Adopting the structure-agency paradigm, this study used survey data to examine how structural constraints in business and the subjective world of individual employers influence their support to paid family leave. We found that industry categories were significantly associated with employers’ support but not the size of their enterprises. Employers’ personal stereotypes of family caregivers and their awareness of relevant laws did not exert significant independent effects on their policy support, but the significant interaction of the two suggested that employers with knowledge of regulations were less likely to formulate attitudes towards paid family leave based on their own stereotypes. Policy practices therefore need to consider the rationality of employers in the local contexts of Hong Kong, and aim to integrate legal education with de-stigmatisation of family caregivers in advocacy programs.

This article examines the relationship between food insecurity and the uncertainty and inadequate financial resources associated with low quality work among lone mother households in the United States. Food insecurity has increased since the start of the Great Recession and is particularly high among lone mother households. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I find that mothers who have been employed part-time involuntarily and experienced job loss have an increased likelihood of experiencing food insecurity. This relationship holds even after controlling for multiple measures of household income, suggesting the relationship between low quality work and food insecurity is not solely determined by low financial resources. Results suggest that, to reduce food insecurity among lone mother families, policymakers must address both the low wages and uncertainty associated with low quality employment.

Active labour market policy (ALMP) reforms have fundamentally changed welfare states over the last decades. Their objectives are quite diverse: workfare reforms have increased conditionality and sanctioning of benefits, while enabling reforms have extended education and training opportunities for the unemployed. Little is known about the political discourse on ALMP reforms. We investigate how the individual unemployed person is portrayed in ALMP reforms via a comparative coding analysis of parliamentary debates on labour market reforms that took place in Germany in 2003 (workfare) and in 2016 (enabling). Our results indicate that compared to enabling reforms the individual unemployed is less important in the framing of workfare reforms but more often blamed. Party characteristics matter: parties on the left more often point to the deservingness of the unemployed. However, when the social democratic party in government introduced a workfare reform they used blaming of unemployed persons as a framing strategy.

Data on the sex industry is notably hard to obtain. Existing evidence points towards an increase in the number of people selling sex, particularly through the online industry. The growing and increasingly diverse population poses challenges to service provision, as new groups are less visible and less likely to be in contact with specialist services. Simultaneously, there are increased calls for policies regulating the sex industry to be grounded in evidence. Relying on systematic literature and data reviews, this article provides a synthesis of the evidence on the prevalence of sex work and prostitution in England and Wales. It shows that no existing source allows producing reliable estimates of the size and characteristics of sex markets. As a result, policy is informed by partial pictures. The article proposes local mapping, an underused approach, to inform both policy development and service provision.

Risks of youth poverty in relation to employment have largely been overlooked both internationally and locally, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving beyond the concepts of income, economic factors and in-work poverty as applied to the general population, we examine the multi-scalar employment risk confronting highly educated working youth (aged eighteen to twenty-nine) in Hong Kong by assessing the intersection of precarious employment and in-work poverty, which is crucial to understanding youth poverty. Drawing on in-depth interview research on creative workers, this study calls for the reconceptualisation of in-work poverty through the lens of precarious employment, which is not viewed as a separate economic entity, but as an organic whole encompassing a multi-scalar risk in economic, social, psychological and political terrains generating an existential problem shaping young people’s sense of future and work-life meaning. This article sheds light on the policy implications of high-educated youth suffering from in-work poverty in the creative industry.

Welfare states allocate and redistribute resources across different groups. For the social legitimacy of welfare states, public support of redistributive processes and outcomes is crucial. An important aspect in this context is the deservingness or non-deservingness of benefit recipients from the perspective of those who both financially contribute to the system and potentially benefit from it. We invited a random sample of the German labour force to participate in an online-survey. Using a factorial survey experiment, we described fictitious unemployed persons with different attributes and asked survey participants on the just maximum benefit duration for each particular case. Judgements regarding just benefit durations vary along the criteria of reciprocity, control, attitude and need: Respondents grant longer unemployment benefits to older jobseekers, as well as to jobseekers who became involuntarily unemployed, had stable employment careers, have to care for the elderly or are sole earners in the household.

This article examines why employers struggle to include disability as part of their active diversity approach. Drawing on cross-national interview data from Norway and the USA, we point to the common finding of employers – who are the target of regulatory disability employment policies – typically falling into the passive employer category of employer engagement, with positive attitudes but negative hiring behaviour. As a partial explanation, we demonstrate the difficulty of identifying and demographically monitoring disabled people among job seekers and employees. We argue that these problems are linked to unique aspects of disability as a diversity category, and tie these to the significance of disability heterogeneity, lack of disclosure and the difficulty of acquiring information related to health. We conclude that organisations need to go beyond mere legislative compliance and be more proactive towards disability as a distinct diversity category.

This introduction to our themed section on social policy responses to the recent cost-of-living crisis spells out this topic and the key issues examined in the section’s main contributions before summarising their findings and overall contribution to the literature. More specifically, to frame this themed section, the present Introduction begins with a concise, up-to-date overview of the inflationary crisis that emerged in late 2021 and evolved throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023. It then charts, and reflects upon, the diversity of responses enacted in a variety of countries reflective of different models of welfare provision in Europe and North America.

The cost-of-living crisis that began in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis and the attempted Russian invasion of Ukraine has major implications for social policy. In advanced industrial countries, this is the most dramatic cost-of-living crisis since the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. In this contribution, we explore the inflation and social policy nexus to identify the nature and sources of inflation, its redistributive and policy implications, and the specific nature of the current cost-of-living crisis compared to two other recent crises: the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on advanced industrial countries and drawing on the available scholarship about these topics, we offer the background necessary to understand the challenges facing welfare states in times of dramatically high inflation. As a way to provide broad context to the present themed section, our discussion stresses the economic, social, and political dynamics shaping social policy adaptation to inflationary pressures.

Social policies’ responsiveness to rising inflation depends in large part on whether they contain automatic indexation mechanisms, which ensure that the real value of wages and benefits expands during inflationary periods. Here we compare how the indexation of Canadian and U.S. policies on pensions, minimum wages, and food security have affected their responsiveness to the recent cost-of-living crisis. Three main conclusions emerge from our analysis. First, automatic indexation is not necessarily a silver bullet to avoid policy drift. Second, automatic indexation and its design are not the only factors that matter to determine whether high inflation leads to policy drift. Finally, in times of higher inflation, social programs that lack automatic indexation can avoid policy drift, as long as a strong political consensus allows for ad hoc social policy expansion capable of offsetting the negative effects of inflations on social benefits.

Rising inflation in the Nordic societies has changed the living standards for many families. The situation differs not only between the four Nordic countries analysed, but even within each of the Nordic countries. The needs for intervention have varied. Several elements have been used to determine who is facing the most risks. This article shows how to combine automatic stabilisers with temporary policy interventions to deal with increased inflation in general or specific sub-elements (such as oil, natural gas). Focus is on the degree of and criteria for targeting. Possible distributional consequences of the adopted measures will be discussed. Lastly, the article considers whether the observed responses to the crisis have implications for the understanding of the Nordic welfare state model. The article investigates institutional, political and economic reasons for the variations in the interventions. The article concludes that in managing the crisis, the Nordic countries have adopted stronger targeting towards those considered to be in need, displaying some innovations in their social policy approach. Yet, one can trace a high degree of path-dependency, with the countries adhering to universalist principles, with an aim of redistributing resources.

This paper compares social policy responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. In seeking to protect citizens from an inflationary shock, a series of fundamental social policy questions arise. What would the aims of support packages be? To what extent should support be universal or targeted? If targeted, did existing policy architectures facilitate or frustrate the targeting of support? As the scale and persistence of the inflationary shock became evident, smaller and near-universal responses gave way to larger support packages with a greater reliance on targeting. Social security systems played an important role in policy responses, though often by passporting one-off payments rather than a strengthening of these core programmes. Passporting led both to improved distributional outcomes vis-à-vis the more universal elements but created new administrative challenges and led to rough justice in some circumstances. The reliance on one-off payments underlined the temporary nature of policy responses.

Policy responses to the inflation crisis in Belgium and the Netherlands show great similarities but also significant differences. In both countries responses were quick and substantial. Measures covered prices more than household incomes while universal, not earmarked measures exceeded selective interventions. However, there were also major differences between the two countries. Because Belgium, unlike the Netherlands, could fall back on the mechanism of automatic indexation of wages and social benefits; it relied more on existing universal policy instruments while in the Netherlands more targeted ad hoc measures were taken which also allowed for innovation in policy making. These different policy paths have their origins in the 1980s when policy models began to diverge and different legacies emerged.

As they were just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southern European nations were confronted with a new shock to their economies – this time in the form of a steep rise in prices. This article describes and typifies the social policy responses and measures adopted in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain in response to rising inflation. We find that Southern European (SE) governments have put forward a substantive fiscal response – which compares well with that of its neighbours, and even with the previous crisis. The thrust of the response was targeted at limiting the pass-through of international energy prices to consumers. This was complemented, albeit to a lesser degree, with direct support to families. Nevertheless, we do find important differences concerning the weight given to (traditional) welfare transfers, and the role given to indexation mechanisms and wage increases. We also find important continuities with the model of crisis-response adopted during the pandemic.