Latin American countries have pioneered innovations in social protection, but their welfare institutions suffer from large and persistent gaps and inequalities in access and provision. This article reviews the substantive body of research addressing this anomaly. A focus on social protection offers a window on what is distinctive about social policy in the region. The social protection matrix in Latin America combines three core institutions: occupational insurance funds, personal pensions and social assistance. The article highlights the role of political realignments shaping current institutions. The critical review yields several pointers for a ‘general’ theory of welfare institutions.

This paper contributes to an emerging discussion in social policy scholarship concerning inequality and the potential of regulation targeting the richest in society. It focuses on public support for maximum income, a policy understood as ‘eco-social’ due to its potential to address the dual crises of increasing inequality and the climate emergency. Based on fifty qualitative interviews conducted in Belgium, the study aims to understand how people reason about the idea of capping the maximum level of income and whether there is potential to increase public support depending on how the policies are designed. The proposal of maximum income prompts rather polarised reactions among supporters and opponents. We identify four distinctive positions: the egalitarian, the supporter of redistribution, the meritocrat and the libertarian. While they are characterised by ideological divergence, both the proponents and opponents of maximum income share concerns about the implementation of such a policy. Using vignettes of differently designed proposals for maximum income, the study also identifies several trade-offs that should be considered when designing a maximum income policy that can secure broad public support.

Any experience of childhood poverty affects life chances, but longer exposure is particularly detrimental to education, health, and future earnings. This study examines trends in long-term childhood poverty in Britain. Using a life-course perspective, we tracked poverty from birth to age ten among 1991–2017 birth cohorts. Our findings show that, on average, 17 per cent of children spent at least half of their childhood in poverty. Long-term poverty affected 25 per cent of those born in the early 1990s, markedly declined to 13–14 percent for cohorts born after the post-1997 welfare reforms, and rose again to 23 per cent for children born following the 2013 austerity reforms. These trends are driven by shifts in the penalties associated with work-family risk factors, rather than by changes in their prevalence. These shifts in penalties reflect broader changes in redistribution and predistribution. The decline in the 1990s was largely due to rising employment and earnings in low-income households, whereas the post-austerity surge stems from reduced redistribution. For cohorts born in the 2000s, social transfers played a substantial role in containing long-term poverty despite worsening predistribution. Overall, the findings show that long-term childhood poverty is a major challenge in Britain and highlight the need to strengthen redistribution and predistribution.

The organisation and financing of services dominate long-term care policy and research. This article argues for reorientation towards the social determinants of long-term care and the inequalities they generate. Building on Dahlgren and Whitehead’s influential equivalent for health, the article offers a framework for understanding how inequalities in long-term care need, access and experience are shaped by social networks, living and working conditions, services and policies, social norms, and political, economic and environmental conditions. International evidence on inequalities in need, access and experience is reviewed, and new analysis is presented for England, based on analysis of the Health Survey for England and the Adult Social Care Survey. Socio-economic inequalities are associated with steep gradients in need. Combined with unequal access to formal services, this results in more unmet need among disadvantaged people and a greater weight of responsibility on their family and friends. The final section explores the implications of a social determinants’ perspective for long-term care: addressing ‘upstream’ drivers of need (including social protection, housing and neighbourhood regeneration); inclusion and empowerment agendas; and ensuring that services effectively compensate for, rather than re-enforce, inequalities.

The development of childcare policy can be understood as a process shaped by conflicts across multiple, interconnected dimensions of policymaking. Whilst existing literature often emphasises tensions between established policy legacies and emerging paradigms such as work–family reconciliation and social investment, this study introduces a multi-dimensional framework that includes conflict and negotiation processes between competing policies co-existing within the policy domain but also within policies themselves, emphasising the dynamics of self-reinforcing and self-undermining feedbacks. Our analysis reveals how efforts to resolve tensions in one policy dimension can inadvertently trigger new conflicts in other dimensions. By examining the South Korean case over three decades, we demonstrate how such interwoven tensions drive long-term policy change, offering scholars a more nuanced understanding of the complex mechanisms underlying policy evolution.

Since 2010, the UK government has transformed social security administration using digital technology and automated instruments to create and deliver a single working-age benefit known as Universal Credit (UC). Social policy scholars have given much attention to the key policy tenets of UC but engaged less with leading aspects of automated and digital delivery and their relationship to different forms of administrative burdens for UC recipients. This article addresses this empirical and conceptual gap by drawing on administrative burdens literature to analyse empirical data from forty-four interviews with UC recipients. We conclude by highlighting three costs: temporal, financial, and emotional. These costs illustrate the political dimensions of technical features of UC, as they affect accountability procedures and paths to legal entitlements that have bearings on certain claimants’ rights.

Older people with long-term care (LTC) needs represent a growing and vulnerable group in European societies. A focus on the interrelation between pension and LTC policies can be useful in determining the extent to which European welfare states address this group’s social risks. This paper asks how European welfare states differ in the extent to which their institutional constellations of pension and LTC policies address older people’s social risks. We systematically measure the generosity of both policy fields at the institutional level to investigate cross-national differences in five European countries representing different welfare regime types. Furthermore, we develop a typology with four types of institutional constellations: residual, pension-oriented supplementary, LTC-oriented supplementary, and complementary. Our empirical results show that the studied welfare states differ in their pension and LTC policy constellations, which has different consequences for the coverage of older people’s social risks.

Content analysis is a valuable tool for analysing policy discourse, but annotation by humans is costly and time consuming. ChatGPT is a potentially valuable tool to partially automate content analysis for policy debates, largely replacing human annotators. We evaluate ChatGPT’s ability to classify documents using pre-defined argument descriptions, comparing its performance with human annotators for two policy debates: the Universal Basic Income debate on Dutch Twitter (2014–2016) and the pension reforms debate in German newspapers (1993–2001). We use the API (GPT-4 Turbo) and user interface version (GPT-4) and evaluate multiple performance metrics (accuracy, precision and recall). ChatGPT is highly reliable and accurate in classifying pre-defined arguments across datasets. However, precision and recall are much lower, and vary strongly between arguments. These results hold for both datasets, despite differences in language and media type. Moreover, the cut-off method proposed in this paper may aid researchers in navigating the trade-off between detection and noise. Overall, we do not (yet) recommend a blind application of ChatGPT to classify arguments in policy debates. Those interested in adopting this tool should manually validate bot classifications before using them in further analyses. At least for now, human annotators are here to stay.

The article examines informal carers’ experiences of co-producing care, combining notions of carer roles with the strategies used by carers in their interactions and negotiations with the health and social services. The aim is to contribute to the theoretical understanding of carers’ role in co-production. On the basis of interviews with carers with a wide range of experiences, we find that they wish to be treated as co-producers, but their roles and impact depend on whether they are tasked with co-producing knowledge or co-producing care. In knowledge production, informal carers are encouraged to take active part and use their voice to further the interests and values of the person in need of support. However, their impact is conditional on their initiatives being recognised by formal caregivers and, to some extent, the person in need of support. In providing care, their efforts largely go unnoticed, and they are less likely to make their voices heard, but their room to manoeuvre appears to be greater. However, when the work of carers is not recognised, formal carers forego resources that are important to the quality and effectiveness of care. The findings, we argue, have important implications for the theory and practice of co-production.

In 2015 the UK government abolished means-tested child-related social security payments to households for third or subsequent children born from April 2017 (the ‘two-child limit’). From 2017 to 2021 there was a sustained increase in the number of abortions annually in England, following a previously flat trend. Using abortion-level microdata from the Department for Health and Social Care, we analysed whether this increase was primarily among women with two or more existing children in more deprived areas, consistent with being a response to the two-child limit. Descriptive analysis and interrupted time series modelling showed that the increase in numbers of abortions over time was not associated with having more children or living in more deprived areas. Instead, from 2017 onwards the previously declining trend among people with no or one previous births reversed. The pattern of change at area level was nearly identical across deciles of the Index of Multiple Deprivation. The cumulative impoverishing effects of austerity may affect abortion decision-making in England generally, but the two-child limit specifically is not associated with the change that followed its introduction. The primary drivers of recent increases in abortions may be non-material, such as uncertainty about the future beyond immediate financial considerations.

Despite a UK policy focus on extending working lives and delaying retirement, the number of workers aged fifty-plus in the workforce has declined post-Covid. The reasons for this decline are not entirely clear. Based on face-to-face interviews with fifty-four UK workers age sixty-plus, this study highlights the important role subjective financial wellbeing plays in the decision-making process regarding retirement timing. Findings show that the current UK state pension age is rarely seen as the ideal retirement age. Notably, the study reveals that mortgage redemption significantly enhances subjective financial wellbeing amongst mid-later life workers. However, prioritising mortgage redemption can lead to pensions being cashed in early and could ultimately lead to poorer long-term financial outcomes. Accessing pensions before retirement is viewed as a way of reducing the risks of income pressures prior to receipt of state pension, and of facilitating phased retirement. The study also highlights the relative and context-dependent nature of how individuals assess their financial situation and overall financial wellbeing as they age.

This paper evaluates the UK Government’s decision to increase the main form of social security by £20 per week during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, exploring whether increasing the generosity of social security for some, but not all, claimants affected food insecurity. Using the Family Resources Survey, we found a decline of about 7 percentage points in food insecurity amongst benefit claimants affected by the uplift compared with claimants not affected (95% CI −13.9 to −0.9%). This association did not change substantively following adjustment for covariates, nor when the model was re-estimated using matching methods. Results were not driven by changes in the composition of claimants over time. These analyses suggest food insecurity could be reduced if the generosity of the social security system increased. In actuality, the UK government went in the opposite direction, removing the £20 uplift in October 2021, potentially exposing claimants to higher rates of food insecurity again.

The financialisation of eldercare has become an internationally widespread phenomenon with significant implications. Previous literature has shown how finance-controlled providers (FCPs) initially launch their eldercare services throughout urban areas, but we know little about the ways that these providers subsequently expand their services. Focusing on nursing homes in Swedish eldercare, our aim with this paper is to develop new knowledge about the expansion strategies guiding FCPs. Deploying a Bourdieusian field perspective to analyse rich document data from Sweden’s three largest FCPs, we found that they sensed ‘booming opportunities’ following demographic trends among older citizens and economic difficulties within municipalities. However, we also find that FCPs perceived ‘looming challenges’ deriving from labour shortages and profit debates in the public sector, indicating demographic trends and economic difficulties were tough to leverage as opportunities. FCPs attempted to overcome such challenges through expansion strategies centred on acquiring eldercare providers and – most notably – building nursing homes. Our findings advance the literature on eldercare financialisation by highlighting how FCPs, in devising expansion strategies, not only adopt financial tools but also incorporate field perceptions. These strategies are ultimately utilised by FCPs to expand their positions as policy actors throughout welfare states that have undergone market-inspired reforms.

Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.

Universal basic income (UBI) is becoming a prominent alternative to reform the welfare state, yet public support for this policy remains a puzzle. Existing scholarship empirically shows that certain groups like the low-income and left-wing show support, but it remains unclear if this translates to a preference for UBI over alternatives. This paper argues against this assumption: UBI challenges welfare norms and deservingness principles, suggesting people would typically prefer means-tested options. Drawing on a conjoint experiment, this paper empirically shows supportive evidence of the idea that support for a UBI does not translate into an inherent preference for UBI. These findings have widespread implications for both the UBI literature and the politics of welfare reform.

This article examines the wellbeing implications of activation policies, focussing on the lived experiences of long-term unemployed jobseekers with public employment services. Using a phenomenological approach and the theory of sustainable wellbeing as a framework, the article explores how activation services function as either need satisfiers or barriers across four wellbeing dimensions: having, loving, doing, and being. Drawing on twenty-four individual and four focus group interviews in the city of Espoo in Finland, the findings highlight the potential of group activities in enhancing wellbeing, particularly in the doing dimension through providing meaningful activity and fostering a sense of autonomy and capability. At best, providing meaningful activity could lead to improvements in the being dimension of wellbeing, such as improved self-image and functional ability, creating a self-reinforcing circle of wellbeing. However, to offer successful need satisfiers, group activities had to also support the loving dimension by offering experiences of social relatedness. Additionally, the interviewees’ lived experiences highlight conditionality as a need barrier, as jobseekers may prioritise maintaining basic material needs over engagement, fearing benefit loss. Ultimately, the article argues for a holistic approach to welfare policy design, considering the interplay of different wellbeing needs to create more inclusive support structures.

A well-defined territorial boundary is essential for the design and implementation of social policies, as it defines the scope of the political community. In states where territorial boundaries are contested, the contours of sovereignty remains ambiguous. This paper studies the effects of contested perceptions of territory on welfare states. The paper distinguishes between institutional solidarity (support for formal welfare arrangements) and intergenerational social solidarity (willingness to help the other generation at a personal cost) and argues that territorial state identity independently influences both, aside from national identities and nationalism. Employing Taiwan’s social security reform as the case, and using observational data derived from the 2019 nationally representative Taiwan Image Survey alongside data from an original survey administered in Taiwan in 2023, the article demonstrates that territorial state identity enhances support for both institutional solidarity and intergenerational social solidarity. This effect persists even when controlling for nationalism. This research underscores the importance of recognising territorial boundaries consistent with the welfare apparatus for the sustainability of welfare states.

By 2025, over eight million UK households will be receiving Universal Credit (UC). Introduced in 2013 to simplify the benefit system and improve work incentives for working age adults, UC has been criticised for causing hardship and exacerbating inequalities. There is limited research on children and young people’s (CYP) views of UC, as well as its health and social impacts. In this pilot qualitative study, creative methods were used to understand the views of UC among CYP (n = 40) aged 12–16 years in North East England. Findings showed diverse and nuanced understanding of UC as well as contested views about conditionality, sanctions, lower UC rates for under-25s and the two-child limit alongside recognition of the stigma and shame associated with benefits. While CYP value paid employment, they stressed the importance of minimum income standards and tailored employment support for UC claimants, taking account of their personal, health and family circumstances. Findings suggest CYP are aware when parents and carers are struggling financially and may try to ease pressures on parents. Debates about principles of equality, fairness, social justice and deservingness were present in young people’s accounts. We conclude by exploring future directions for a CYP-centred approach to social policy.

The social protection of platform workers is considered one of the most precarious features and political challenges of this new form of employment. Still, there have only been a few empirical investigations on this issue to date. This article presents an explorative empirical analysis of the social protection of platform workers in Germany – a conservative welfare regime with a strong link between standard employment and institutionalised social protection. On the basis of an online survey amongst 719 self-employed platform workers, we examine how different employment patterns correspond to institutionalised protection against sickness and old age. We empirically explore different protection types and analyse how they differ regarding working conditions in platform work and individual social policy preferences. Findings reveal that conditions of platform work and social protection as well as demands and regulatory preferences vary notably across different clusters of platform workers. Still, the vast majority votes against obligatory social insurances for platform workers and favours self-employment over dependent employment. Against this background, we discuss challenges for future attempts aiming at improving social protection for platform workers. This study adds to the literature by empirically exploring platform workers’ social protection and social policy preferences, which have been overlooked to date.

The Finnish parental leave system has undergone numerous reforms to encourage fathers’ leave uptake, in part to redress unequal divisions of early childcare, yet many fathers have not taken full advantage of it. Leave is usually taken from the workplace, and though workplace factors are often cited as typical barriers to uptake, they remain understudied compared to policy and individual-level motivators. We systematically investigated the association of important workplace structural characteristics and parental leave decisions of private-sector-employed first-time fathers in 2013–2017, using Finnish register data and a multilevel Bayesian approach. While the probability of taking father’s quota varied by workplace gendered structures and competitiveness, these differences were due to the selection of fathers into workplaces on individual-level characteristics, rather than resulting from differing workplace structures. Workplace educational level was important, but only for tertiary-educated fathers: highly-educated fathers in low-educated environments were less likely to take longer leaves, suggesting that replaceability may be the main mechanism behind the differences. These findings suggest that differing workplace contexts have less to do with structural factors than with workplace cultures and fathers’ individual situations, calling for further study on the interplay of individual and contextual factors in usage of paternal leave entitlements.