The development of father leave policies marks a critical step toward gender equality in family policy. Despite promising policy developments, father leave policies continue to face resistance and negative feedback from various stakeholders, constraining their development. Their implementation has exhibited considerable variation across countries, ranging from mere symbolic gestures to substantive reforms. This article provides a comprehensive framework for understanding their evolution, emphasising that progress depends not solely on public support but on a mix of factors, including electoral competition, policy diffusion, negative feedback, and crises. The contrasting outcomes observed in South Korea and the Czech Republic highlight how similar drivers can produce divergent policy responses, challenging the view that drivers (like crises or electoral competition) have a predictable effect on policy change. This complexity necessitates a re-evaluation of existing theoretical frameworks to more accurately reflect the intricate dynamics at play in policy development.

Informal social protection systems (ISPs) continue to play a significant role where government-sanctioned social security measures do not reach vulnerable populations. Despite their essence and utility, they remain marginalised in social policy, theory, and practice, and thus many call for their integration. However, research has often overlooked factors embedded in the integration process particularly how these can affect the future performance of ISPs if they are to interact with formal systems. Adopting an argumentative conceptual approach, and a synthesis of social policy literature on ISPs, we provide a framework for managing relationships with actors to optimise the interaction between ISPs and formal social welfare systems through a conceptual framework that utilises design thinking and community development principles. We outline three essential conditions for effective engagement with ISPs to achieve social impact, urging government and others to engage with empathy; treat communities as equal collaborators; and keep a social justice focus.

In this study, we focus on European immigration attitudes in the perspective of deservingness perceptions and political orientation. Our data are conducted from the European Social Survey (2016) database, which contains 21 European countries and 39,400 participants. We used the multilevel method to study the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. The results demonstrate that the more negative deservingness perceptions are, the more negative immigration attitudes more likely become. Moreover, country-level political orientation moderate the relationship between immigration attitudes and deservingness perceptions. Deservingness perceptions have a greater role in explaining immigration attitudes on countries with political left-context, which gives us a new perspective to understand the public debates about immigration.

Facing dwindling birthrates, East Asia has shown unprecedented fertility-oriented family policy expansion. Despite this shared objective, this research argues that East Asian family policy has varied in ‘inclusiveness’, namely, the extent to which it equally promotes all births, irrespective of familial socioeconomic status in particular. Firstly, from an inclusiveness-centred perspective, this article builds three different ideal pronatalist family policy approaches: the ‘inclusive’, where pronatalist family support is provided for almost everyone; the ‘selective’, where it is more accessible to middle-/upper-income households; and the ‘residual’, where it is concentrated on low-income classes. Guided by this conceptual framework, it compares Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. It reveals that Japan and Singapore promoted a selective path, and Taiwan favoured a residual one, whilst South Korea pioneered more inclusive support. However, it also suggests that the other three societies recently adopted more inclusive pronatalist family policies, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article investigates the life satisfaction consequences of migration through unique comparisons of “settler” migrants spanning three family generations and multiple European destinations with their “stayer” and “returnee” counterparts based in the origin country of Turkey. The data are drawn from 5,980 personal interviews conducted as part of the pioneering 2000 Families Survey. The results show that despite being monetarily the most impoverished across all destinations and generations studied, the settlers tend to be more satisfied with their lives than the “stayers” and the “returnees.” However, a downward trend is observed among younger generations, irrespective of their migration status and country context. The results confirm the significance of poverty and asset status for migrants’ and their descendants’ appraisal of life, as well as highlighting the independent effect of the context. Strikingly, however, those residing in countries with more generous welfare states proved not necessarily to be more satisfied.

Area-based initiatives are designed to improve economic, physical, and social outcomes in a formally defined territorial area. A considerable amount of literature highlights that the implementation of this approach differs considerably between Western European countries. The study identifies three common approaches. The first, defined as a sector-based approach, focuses on the coordination of welfare services in a specific area. This approach may promote an efficient organisation of specific welfare sectors but does not seek to implement a multi-sectoral approach. The second, defined as the integrated approach, pays particular attention to institutional arrangements. The third, informal relations-based approach, is developed mainly in intersubjective relations and focuses on individual abilities, often without systematic engagement to change how public and private institutions work. In this study, I outlined a conceptual framework for a new perspective in area-based initiatives that recognises the plurality of autonomies that operate in a community.

Affordable, good quality childcare creates opportunities for many parents to better reconcile work and care or reduces family care to enable other valuable contributions to society. However, childcare studies often overlook parents of children with additional or complex care needs. These parents spend a greater amount of time on caregiving, providing care that goes beyond that of parents of typically developing children. As such, their opportunities beyond caregiving can be limited. Resources, like childcare services, can be crucial in supporting the reconciliation of care with other valued activities in life. This article contributes to the cross-national childcare policy literature by conceptualizing comparative indicators to assess the availability, accessibility, and affordability of childcare policy design for children with additional or complex care needs. It then applies these indicators to a comparison of childcare policy design in England and the Netherlands, providing an operationalization for further empirical analysis.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many countries have expanded the level and coverage of current social insurance and social assistance programs as well as implemented new programs. Based on three separate datasets, V-Dem V-Party dataset; fourteen structured expert interviews; and a dataset of 114 social security measures, we study the link between the welfare regime, pandemic-related social policy measures, and incumbents’ ideological stand. Does the pandemic-related social policy measures mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents? What role did the welfare regime play? We scrutinise eight OECD countries (Denmark, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK, and the US) representing three different welfare regimes: corporatist-conservative countries, liberal countries, and socio-democratic countries. The key findings of this article show that the pandemic-related social policy measures did not mirror the political attitudes of the incumbents.

Poverty prevention is a central concern of welfare states, and the redistribution of financial resources has been a major strategy to realise it. The differences in addressees, extent, and conditions of this redistribution have been intensively studied. The relevance of family in poverty prevention policies, though, has hardly been analysed, although all forms of welfare redistribution “factor in” family in one way or another, and particularly so in poverty prevention. We analyse how family membership impacts welfare state redistribution to the poor to identify redistributive logics in terms of family, that is the unequal redistribution of public resources to particular family types. We systematically analyse and present the similarities and differences in these redistributive logics, using the micro-simulation model EUROMOD for the countries of the EU. The results show that poor families benefit from anti-poverty measures in form of additional benefits, but family-related financial obligations often exceed these.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) is among the most important services for children and their parents as it promotes children’s development and enables mothers’ employment. Previous research has shown that there is an educational gradient as children of mothers with a low education level participate less in ECEC services, but less is known about the development of this inequality. This study, using EU-SILC survey data, focuses on the development of inequality in ECEC use of children under 3 years of age during 2004–2019, and on disparities between three categories of education levels among mothers. The results show that, together with increasing ECEC participation rates, overall inequality has increased in Europe. Inequality has increased between low- and other education levels, whereas in a few cases, a decrease has happened between medium- and high-educated mothers. It is important to pay attention to socioeconomic disparities with rising participation rates.

In this paper, we conduct an in-depth review of and commentary on two frameworks for international comparative work focused on education systems and skill formation – specifically, welfare regime and production regime approaches. We focus on how tertiary education is understood to function relationally within a national policy repertoire and explore the interplay between education and economic systems. Whereas the welfare regime literature illuminates why some regimes are conducive to human capital production and create more equitable educational and labour market opportunities, the production regime literature focuses on the ways that actors such as government, educational institutions, and unions optimise skill formation. These two theoretical perspectives offer both rival and complementary explanations of varying patterns in public investment, differentiation in education systems, and participation rates in tertiary education across countries. Our analytical account provides useful insights for understanding different national education policies and framing future research, including informing these perspectives with the more recent theoretical contributions of the social investment approach. In relation to changing conceptions of the knowledge economy, education, skill development, and the nature of employment, these two theoretical perspectives continue to provide useful conceptual lenses to examine the education/skill /employment nexus.

Child nutrition, health and development are closely tied to maternal nutrition, health and well-being. The underlying drivers of poor maternal and child nutritional outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa are structural in nature. These risks include social, economic, and environmental factors that together compound vulnerability to poor outcomes. Poverty, as a driver of poor maternal and child health outcomes, is an important determinant that is both a cause and a consequence of malnutrition. The United Nations’ Children’s Fund (UNICEF)’s conceptual model for determinants of maternal and child nutrition outcomes released in 2020, is the agency’s latest iteration of child nutrition frameworks. The model identifies the underlying causes of malnutrition as extending beyond food and diets, to include household level dynamics, maternal factors, and the external environment. The manuscript discusses UNICEF’s conceptual model and its applicability in sub-Saharan Africa. It also considers the evidence on interventions aimed at addressing maternal and child nutrition in the region and the location of social protection among these policy tools, with a special focus on the extent to which these resonate with the conceptual model. It concludes by considering the conditions required for social protection instruments to work in the region and similar settings in the Global South. In this way, the manuscript provides a critical reflection about the role of social protection as a nutrition-sensitive instrument in sub-Saharan Africa, in the context of maternal and child nutrition outcomes.

Social policy scholars seeking to understand the dynamics of social protection arrangements have advocated for an actor-centric approach. However, when seeking to understand the impact of colonialism on social policymaking, most scholars have focused not on actors but on ideas and institutions. To address this gap, this paper develops an actor-centric framework for understanding the introduction of social policies in colonial contexts. We identify and compare actor constellations of relevance to the introduction of social policies in two colonies of French West Africa that differ with respect to precolonial population density: Dahomey (present-day Benin), with a relatively high precolonial population density, and Côte d’Ivoire, with a relatively low precolonial population density. Despite evidence that precolonial population density can shape colonial strategies and policies, the results provide no supporting evidence that precolonial population density is a driver of meaningful variation in the introduction of social policies or in the composition of the actor constellations from which they originate. Instead, the results point to the key role of transnational and regional actors in the introduction of social policies in colonial contexts. They also highlight the domestic economic and societal arenas as sites where: i) heterogeneity emerges in the social policy actor constellations; and ii) local actors mediate tensions arising from imperially driven social transformations.

Nigeria is home to a significant and growing “youth” population, over a third of it below 24 years of age. The demographic potential for productivity and growth this group represents occurs alongside large-scale unemployment among young people of working age. The “unemployment crisis” has deep historical roots and exists within a wider context of poor governance, insecurity, conflict, and poverty. Policy norms and practices to address youth unemployment in Nigeria largely centre on skill development and job creation, with complementary schemes selectively targeted to specific groups of vulnerable and poor individuals. Measures are typically ad hoc, detached from a coherent programme of sustainable reform. Pre-existing structural factors and capacity constraints also shape the effectiveness of these programmes. While a productivist focus within current policy is potentially empowering in giving young Nigerians “worker” status, it also detracts from attending to deep-rooted structural problems seen to affect young people in disproportionate ways. Securing meaningful choices and lives for Nigerian youth requires reframing youth unemployment beyond labour markets alone, and embedded in ideas of equality and collective action.

This study provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of skill formation systems in Japan and South Korea, considering the nuances in active labour market policies (ALMPs) and institutional transformations in the post-industrial landscape. Both nations initially adopted segmentalist skill formation systems; however, they now exhibit divergent paths. Korea, in particular, has undergone institutional changes from segmentalist to a liberal skill formation system, with firms reducing their involvement in skill formation, resulting in a pronounced skill formation gap. Firms have curtailed their role in skill formation in alignment with environmental changes, and ALMPs have primarily centred on job creation for the elderly and small- and medium-sized enterprise employment subsidies. Conversely, Japan has maintained consistent policy approaches despite similar environmental changes. This study highlights that these divergent trajectories are rooted in the different stages of institutional maturity established during industrialization.

Social protection has expanded unevenly across Africa because of variations in both the initial adoption of programmes and their subsequent ‘institutionalisation’ through government-funded expansions in coverage. The case of Zambia illustrates how policy coalitions promoting the institutionalisation of social protection compete with other claimants over prioritisation in public spending. Even when faced with competitive elections, incumbent governments may prioritise other programmes over social protection. In Zambia, the incumbent government announced and budgeted for a massive government-funded expansion of social protection but failed to allocate the necessary funding – with the result that benefits were not paid to registered beneficiaries. If ‘institutionalisation’ is understood as entailing the political irreversibility of expansion, then the rhetoric of institutionalisation belied the reality (for several years) of retrenchment. The weakened policy coalition supporting social protection was unable to prevent government defunding as scarce government resources were allocated to competing programmes.

A growing scholarship has documented changes in welfare policy in twenty-first-century Latin America, but no study yet has offered a systematic assessment, using a welfare regime approach, that captures the main trends across countries and over time. For a sample of 17 countries, this study offers a comprehensive tool to measure shifts in social policy regimes, highlighting three dimensions of welfare – inclusion, generosity, and equity – across four policy areas: transfers, health care, education, and family policies. Countries made significant progress in generosity and inclusion, but none improved equity. A cluster analysis based on the three dimensions of welfare offers a new, more precise classification of Latin American countries in welfare regimes in 2002 and 2017. Although the analysis shows minor shifts in country groupings, an increasing reliance on social assistance policies, particularly among the most advanced countries, marks a shift towards what I call compensatory regimes.

Facing ageing challenges, long-term care (LTC) has become a focus of policymaking and policy analysis in China. However, the burgeoning literature obscures a lack of understanding of LTC policymaking, implying a linear and neutral process. This depoliticisation is unrealistic and contributes little to understanding the diversity of LTC policies and improving inclusive LTC provision. Focusing on the core institutional arrangement, LTC insurance (LTCI), this article explores a highly politicised policymaking process and reveals complex political deliberations behind different LTCI choices across regions. Underpinned by the multiple streams approach, which supports a systematic comparison of the policy process, this article identifies four key factors from a relational perspective that influence LTCI policymaking, including the tension between evidence and politics in the construction of LTC issues, the tension between policy effectiveness and stability in the assessment of policy options, strong or weak political will, and the presence or absence of municipal government.