When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, governments were mainly relaying on pre-pandemic policies when introducing changes to social policies. However, the crisis did lead to transformative action as well. In this article, we explored the novel direct payments, delivered beyond existing social risk categories such as unemployment or sickness. Our exploration demonstrates that most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries did not introduce novel payments. Exceptions were Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seven countries also continued and modified payments while the crisis continued. All the novel direct payments met some of the characteristics of universal basic income (UBI). The idea of universality was realised in Japan and South Korea. The key findings of this study suggest that the COVID-19-related novel direct payments were primarily emergency benefits for people affected by the pandemic and interpreted as quasi-basic income in times of crisis.

As pressures build, this study can serve as a guidepost for scholars and policymakers to learn from global trends in social inclusion and social inclusion policy. Our systematic review of global trends in social inclusion and social inclusion policy points to the general expansion and retrenchment of social inclusion policy amid increasing social exclusion associated with trends such as globalisation and neoliberalism. In the absence of recent, detailed case descriptions of social inclusion policy at the national level, we call for a renewed scholarly focus on case studies of social inclusion policy. We also discuss the likelihood that persistent climate change, migration, ageing populations, and technological innovations are poised to dramatically influence global social inclusion and suggest that future research should seek to understand the relationship between these developments and social inclusion. As we look to the future and the growing needs of excluded populations, we aim to use this study to learn from and build on these global trends to promote the inclusion of excluded groups around the world.

Recently there has been increased attention in critiques of paid work and calls for less work via working-time reduction. Yet except for universal basic income and the shorter working week, few have examined how welfare states, more broadly, can effectively reduce working-time. This article argues widespread change is required to effectively reduce working-time. First, it explores how welfare states have historically affected working-time. Second, it examines universal basic income and the shorter working week as conduits for working-time reduction. Third, the article analyses alternative ways that working-time reduction has been achieved in advanced welfare states through, for example, parental leave policies, sabbaticals, and annual leave entitlements. In doing so, it concludes with a ‘life-time’ perspective, whereby the goal of less work is imagined and achieved over a whole life. This holds the best hope for a gradual, but profound, change in social and cultural norms around paid work.

In recent decades, populist parties and leaders have obtained great political success. Since populism plays on voter dissatisfaction with the political elite, we might expect that dissatisfaction with the welfare state should also play a role. In this study, we suggest measures to assess welfare state performance (WSP), and we examine how assessment of WSP helps to explain support for the populist political parties – both rightwing and leftwing. Our findings are based on the sixth round of European Social Survey data that has a special module on democracy, which includes questions that enables us to measure WSP. This article shows that WSP is a significant predictor in explaining support for populist parties, but the dynamics differ between how WSP influences support for leftwing populist (LWP) and rightwing populist (RWP) parties.

The discourse on universal basic income varies widely across countries. In Sweden, public opinion is generally negative even in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is barely discussed on the public policy table. On the other hand, in South Korea, public opinion is not as negative as in Sweden, and basic income is actively raised as policy agenda. Our study based on survey results reaffirmed the contrasting attitudes of the Swedish and Suth Korean people regarding basic income and related tax increase. The basic income could appeal to the people in South Korea. On the contrary, there is little room for the introduction of basic income in Sweden. The analysis also revealed similarities within the difference. Those with high income, political-right orientation, high protection against income loss, and high tax burden would be more unfavourable toward introduction of basic income no matter which country they live in.

This research investigates Universal Credit (UC) claimants’ interpretation of their experiences when interacting with frontline stakeholders. Government paternalist frameworks restrict justifiable paternalistic intervention to those measures intended to correct individuals’ judgement and means to achieve their own ends, while minimising the loss of autonomy. This study is situated at the intersection of government paternalism and street-level bureaucracy literature. We highlight the need for clear government interference intentions in defining paternalism and for distinguishing between the motivations of frontline staff and overarching government policy. Our argument is that the government should assess and consider the frontline staff’s perception of what ought to be promoted, intervening only when there is a failure in the frontline staff’s approach to achieving the wellbeing of the individual as determined by the individual themselves, and where governmental judgement can achieve better outcomes for the individual.

The respective delivery roles of public and private providers is a key battleground in the ongoing transformation of welfare states. But despite a burgeoning literature on public attitudes to aspects of welfare state activity, delivery has to date received scant attention. This article makes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap. Drawing on original survey data from the United Kingdom, it analyses attitudes towards the delivery of social policies and explores their relationship to other welfare attitudes. We show that views on delivery display less variation than attitudes to welfare generosity and redistribution, that public support for private sector involvement in delivery is limited to certain fields and that there is very little consistent support for outright privatisation. The article thus demonstrates that there is very little congruence between attitudes to ‘welfarism’ and attitudes to ‘statism’.

This study explored the social policy context for international students in the UK and its implications for social exclusion (an inability to fully participate in society). Within a rapid review policy literature addressing international student experience, forty-two articles from the Web of Science and Social Science Research Network (SSRN) were selected through multiple screenings. Migration and education were the most explored policy areas, followed by inequalities, work, health and wellbeing, security, and housing. Results demonstrated that policy both creates barriers to inclusion (e.g. hostile environment migration/bordering practices) and supports inclusion/adaption to social exclusion-related challenges (e.g. sanctuary scholarships for forced migrants, Graduate visas). All international students to some degree lack equitable participation in wellbeing-relevant provision. Overall, policies are constructed so the state and universities can extract value from internationals without fully including them in British society. Policies abdicate responsibility for students’ inclusion, making it expensive and complicated to build a life there.

An attractive way to address both the climate crisis and the problem of global inequality is to tax rich countries, individuals and businesses, who are responsible for the greater part of carbon emissions, and redistribute the proceeds to create carbon-neutral infrastructure and address human needs through state action (see Raworth 2017 Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, Penguin Random House; Gough 2017 Heat, Need and Human Greed, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.). However the dominant value framework in which ideas about wealth, need, and redistribution are embedded centres on deservingness. This largely justifies existing poverty and wealth-holdings, making redistribution within and beyond the rich countries of the global North hard to achieve. Two developments – the ‘deliberative wave’ of citizen participation in government, and the impact of crises in nurturing prosocial values – point to a rapid and sustained value shift. This paper reviews and analyses evidence to consider the practical politics of oughnut economics.

This paper argues that young people who claim state support in the UK are prone to accept the contemporary hegemonic conceptualisation within advanced capitalist societies, that individual behaviour and mindset are the key determinants of valorised labour market outcomes. The notion that the self is all encompassing and one can, and should, choose to overcome all challenges in life through self-improvement is particularly salient for recent generations of young people. Social policy reinforces this trend by encouraging changes in the individual to combat structural problems, and such ideology is present in the contemporary intensification of welfare conditionality. This paper draws upon secondary analysis of longitudinal qualitative data generated as part of the Welfare Conditionality Project (2013–2019) to demonstrate that young people who experience welfare conditionality are likely to individualise pathways to their future aspirations.

Despite increasing attention to the importance of gender as an analytic to understanding neoliberal welfare reform, little attention has been paid to how motherhood operates to structure experiences. We propose the term ‘maternal activation’ to describe how homeless mothers as a group are subject to, and yet repurpose and resist, specific forms of social control characterising neoliberal paternalistic welfare structures. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with fifty-four frontline homelessness workers, and eighteen homeless mothers, within the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system, we argue that homeless mothers have distinct experiences of neoliberal welfare governance. They navigate contradictory demands of attentive caregiving and economically engaged citizenship, amid devaluation of care created by a neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurialism. However, performing intense motherhood offers strategic advantage for homeless mothers by enabling them to be read as ‘legible’. This highlights the utility of motherhood as a framework to understand welfare citizenship.

Employer attitudes towards maternity leave are often framed as a tension between opposition based on costs or ideal worker norms, versus normative or ethical support. How do employers combine and prioritise these justifications in practice? Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven British managers, this article develops a typology of employers – risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven – distinguishing the nature of support and underlying blends of economic, normative, and moral justifications. It shows how moral reasoning – often assumed to align only with a supportive stance – is also mobilised to justify exclusionary attitudes and even overt discrimination against maternity leave-takers. Further, against assumptions that shifting cultural norms and expanding rights foster greater employer support, discomfort with these changes can reinforce resistance. Relational dynamics also shape attitudes, with positive affective–personal ties between managers and staff prompting greater support. These findings offer a new lens on how family leave rights are interpreted in everyday managerial practice.

The introduction of Universal Credit, a new means-tested benefit for working-aged people in the UK, entails a significant expansion of welfare conditionality. Due to mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care, women are particularly affected by the new conditionality regime for parents who have the primary responsibility for the care of dependent children. This article draws upon qualitative longitudinal research with twenty-four mothers subject to the new conditionality regime to analyse the gendered impacts of this new policy and whether there is variation in experiences according to social class. The analysis demonstrates that the new conditionality regime devalues unpaid care and is of limited efficacy in improving sustained moves into paid work. It also shows that the negative gendered impacts of the conditionality within Universal Credit are at times exacerbated for working-class mothers.

This article stresses the need for climate adaptation to better grasp the social dynamics of vulnerability to climate change. It argues that prevailing approaches in the UK have been inattentive to the social determinants of vulnerability for ethnic and racial minorities. The article begins by setting out the ways in which adaptation is understood and interpolated across multiple levels in the policy process, before discussing why prevailing approaches struggle to recognise that certain social dynamics render some populations more vulnerable to the ongoing effects of climate change. Following this, it will focus on domains of housing and health to reinscribe vulnerability in adaptation as a multidimensional concept, something that registers differentiated levels of structured adaptive capacity by focusing on racialised communities. It concludes by elaborating ways forward in climate adaptation planning and action.

Improving community attitudes and behaviours is core to improving inclusion for people with disability. To identify ways to achieve such change, we analysed data from qualitative interviews with sixty-one expert stakeholders in Australia, informed by our preceding literature review on effective interventions. We identified five themes describing factors with the potential to change attitudes and behaviours to improve inclusion and reduce discrimination: ensuring people with disability have active presence across all life domains; leadership by people with disability, together with organisational and governmental leadership that values the diverse contribution of people with disability; a holistic approach to policy and interventions that targets multiple levels of change; long-term and adequately resourced initiatives to achieve structural and sustained change; and commitment to measuring and monitoring change interventions, to inform decisions and maintain accountability.

We apply a synthesis review to revisit the concept, measurement, and operationalisation of social inclusion and exclusion in the context of comparative social policy, integrating the vast literature on the concepts, with the aim of elucidating a clearer understanding of the concepts for use by scholars and policymakers around the planet. In turn, we outline the conceptual development of the concepts, how they have been operationalised through social policy, and how they have been measured at the national and individual levels. Through our review, we identify limitations in extant conceptualisation and measurement approaches and suggest directions for refining conceptual and measurement frameworks to enhance their utility in social inclusion policy, emphasising the concepts’ multidimensional, multilevel, dynamic, and relational essence and highlighting their connection to related concepts such as social capital, social integration, and social citizenship.

Market failure, around credit provision, typically centres on adverse selection and moral hazard. We utilise a Diverse Economies Framework to distinguish between different types of lender (mainstream, alternative, and non-market) and neoclassical economic theory as an analytic framework to introduce three additional forms of market failure – diseconomies of small scale, externalities, and excess demand and oversupply. This suggests market failure in the UK sub-prime consumer credit market is more comprehensive than previously recognised, increases the argument for government intervention and points to four policy responses – public subsidies, patient capital, regulation, and taxation – to complement and supplement market responses. Without support, not-for-profit sub-prime lenders, such as Community Development Finance Institutions, will continue in their struggle to survive, further exposing an already-vulnerable group of borrowers to even greater debt and associated worse health and wellbeing.

This article used text mining processes to map continuity and change in policy principles of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia and reflect on the underlying agendas of reform. Specifically, this research aimed to: (1) examine the substantive content of the NDIS legislative, operational and reform documentation, (2) assess changes in objects, principles and issues over time, and (3) discuss the implications of these shifting logics and agendas. To achieve this, text mining approaches were applied to ten key NDIS documents from 2011 to 2019.

The findings included a low prevalence of ‘rights’-based terminology, sustained attention to Scheme ‘costs’ but limited latterly attention to ‘sustainability’, and increasing prominence of interpersonal (e.g., ‘family’, ‘community’) and decision-making terminology (e.g., ‘decision’, ‘review’). How these shifts have influenced subsequent proposed reforms is explored and ongoing dilemmas about designing policy that ensures rights and entitlements, while balancing cost, sustainability and consistency are identified.

Activation policies, especially formal upskilling, can strengthen social inequality among long-term unemployed people. Also, receiving skill-enhancing activities may be at odds with the ‘work first’ principle. Drawing on interviews with frontline workers in the Norwegian employment and welfare service (NAV), this article analyses how frontline workers handle the challenging aspects arising from activation policies in providing enabling activities to claimants who need comprehensive support. The findings suggest that frontline workers face claimants who expect to embark on an education, and on the contrary, claimants who lack motivation or capability to do so. In both cases, frontline workers are challenged in terms of experiencing contradictory expectations from policies and users and in assessing future outcomes and suitability of the services. Education activities provided by the public employment agency (PES) involves multiple policy fields and require specific competency on the part of frontline workers.