The provision of formal childcare services holds significant potential benefits in addressing challenges posed by population ageing, labour shortages and welfare dependency. However, existing literature indicates persistent differentials in formal childcare uptake by migration background, with limited understanding of underlying demand-side factors. This study addresses this gap by comprehensively examining demographic, socio-economic, employment-related and attitudinal characteristics as potential explanations for these disparities. Utilising data from the Generations and Gender Survey across seven high-income countries, our findings reveal that whereas differentials for migrants’ descendants are limited and insignificant even without controlling for background variables, the negative differential for migrants disappears almost completely. Socio-economic status and particularly employment potential emerge as a key explanatory factors alongside differential attitudes towards maternal employment, which seem to play a role in some contexts, yet not in others. Cross-country differences in the results are discussed in the face of socio-economic gradients in formal childcare uptake, migrant-native gaps in the labour market and below-demand supply of formal childcare, yet also plead for future research interacting demand- and supply-side factors for a larger set of countries. In conclusion, this study reveals the intricate interplay of demographic, socio-economic and attitudinal factors underlying migrant–native disparities in formal childcare uptake.

The calibration between national regulatory oversight and local policy autonomy is a prominent feature in the discussion regarding social assistance institutions in large countries. The complex principal-agent structure embedded within such institutions and the resultant information asymmetry make it difficult for the national principal to monitor the behaviour of subnational agents, resulting in prevalent mis-targeting of welfare benefits and petty corruption. Built on a principal-agent framework, this study seeks to explain the puzzling shrinkage of China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (Dibao) in recent years. Accountability mechanisms are found to exert major impacts on the scale of welfare programs. Using a unique city-level panel dataset and difference-in-differences (DID) strategy, this quantitative study finds that discipline inspection by upper-level government leads to a significant decrease of Dibao coverage in a city, a link reinforced by the local intensity of China’s anti-corruption campaign. Blame avoidance and the defensive reaction of local agents triggered by draconian enforcement of accountability result in distorted welfare administration on the ground. Building informational capacity presents a useful approach in mitigating the vertical control–autonomy dilemma illustrated in this study.

The studies of descriptive political representation demonstrate that the share of women amongst local elected officials increases, but mayors are still predominantly men. This paper contributes to the literature on the link between the descriptive and substantive representation of women at the local level. It investigates the influence of mayors’ gender on the development of local childcare policies in Poland. We employ quasi-experimental research schemes (difference-in-differences and generalised synthetic control) to study changes in childcare provision and public spending on nurseries and kindergartens. We merged electoral data (changes on the mayoral position) and registry data on local budget expenditures and service availability covering a period of more than 16 years. We do not find any systematic causal link, suggested by the extant literature on substantive representation, between the election of a female mayor and the expansion of childcare services.

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.

Southern European welfare states have historically been characterised by the absence of national safety nets. However, these countries have witnessed a succession of policy reforms over the past three decades. In 2020, the Spanish Parliament unanimously approved the ‘Ingreso Mínimo Vital’ to finally cease being the only European country without a minimum income scheme at the national level. This article investigates the political and institutional mechanisms that enabled this policy reform, which was particularly unexpected due to the fragmentation of the party system along both ideological and territorial dimensions. To solve this puzzle, I employ the ‘explaining-outcome’ process tracing method and rely on qualitative data from official documents, party manifestos and parliamentary interventions spanning from 2015 to 2020. In addition, I build on ten expert interviews with relevant actors directly involved in the reform, conducted between 2022 and 2024. Findings illustrate that inclusive path departure was possible through two political stages. First, left-wing party competition and strong socio-political demand (2014–2020) allowed for the introduction of the scheme into the political agenda. Second, territorial politics and the external shock of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic ultimately contributed to mitigating expected political cleavages during the parliamentary process.

This paper examines why, some 25 years beyond the Belfast-Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland (NI) remains a highly polarised society despite the return of devolution (in February 2024) after a 2-year hiatus. Using the theoretical lens of social capital, it draws on the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey and the World Values survey (the latter conducted for the first time in NI) to examine levels of trust as a pre-requisite to reconciliation between the two main communities. The research finds a high degree of trust towards people of another religion and limited affective polarisation across the main political parties. Yet government community relations policies appear to have had limited impact over time and may contribute to ‘bad social capital’ through bonding within communities at the expense of ‘the other’. The paper considers tackling social and economic inequalities, common to both communities, as a means of bridging social capital.

This article presents a novel framework for analysing the politics of eco-social policies, focusing on the political conflicts surrounding this third generation of social risks. We distinguish two key dimensions of conflict: an ideational approach dimension, which focuses on conflicts among political actors over the possible synergies and trade-offs between social and ecological goals and their potential integration through eco-social policies, and a design dimension with several sub-dimensions related to the formulation and implementation of eco-social policies. To illustrate the merit of this analytical framework, we apply it to the analysis of party manifestos for the 2021 German federal election. Our findings reveal a striking divergence in the first dimension: While most parties emphasise the synergy potential of eco-social policies, albeit to varying degrees, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) stands out by opposing this narrative. The second dimension largely reflects established welfare positions, with centre-left and left-wing parties advocating state involvement and social consumption (the Social Democratic Party of Germany [SPD], the Greens, and The Left) and selective/needs-oriented measures (SPD and The Left) to a greater extent than centre-right parties (Christian Democratic Union of Germany [CDU]/Christian Social Union in Bavaria [CSU] and Free Democratic Party [FDP]). Furthermore, pro-growth approaches dominate, but there are signs that positions on degrowth policies may emerge as a significant conflict line in the future. Our analysis shows that eco-social policy conflicts are multidimensional, partly reshaping the political landscape around welfare policies, and are about not only how eco-social policies should be designed but whether they can and should be pursued at all.

Despite the increased emphasis on ‘employer engagement’ to take advantage of demand-side active labour market policies, little attention has been paid to managers. In this paper, we examine the micro-practices of engaged managers in including jobseekers from disadvantaged groups. Through a qualitative study of managers, jobseekers and other stakeholders in twenty-one companies with a history of employing disadvantaged jobseekers, we identify three broad types of engagement by managers: vacancy-oriented, ability-oriented, and growth-oriented. The types of engagement involve crucial differences in motivation, caring and accommodation on the part of the employing managers. Our findings highlight the multi-facetedness of employer engagement when examined from the perspective of managers and propose ‘inclusive leadership’ as a useful lens to understand engaged employers.

The Participation Opportunities Act (POA) came into force in Germany in January 2019 with the aim of making publicly subsidised employment accessible to the long-term unemployed, whose prospects of regular employment are poor. The POA responds to a two-fold exclusion suffered by this group: exclusion from the labour market and a kind of ‘internal exclusion’ from social services. We argue that the POA can therefore be understood as a ‘policy of dignity’ and thus as a challenge to the neoliberal recognition order. The aim of this paper is an empirical examination of this thesis based on qualitative interviews with managers and professionals at German job centres. We apply Honneth’s theory of recognition as a theoretical framework and examine two levels of implementation: the interpretation of the law and how it is put into practice from 2019-2023.

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.

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.

We are living through cruel and frightening times. How should a progressive policy studies respond? Critique undoubtedly plays a role: the task of exposing the structural conditions, political interests and power asymmetries that lie beneath the ‘prosaic surface’ of policy is an urgent one. But are these primarily deconstructive efforts enough? Can they lead us out of this quagmire, alone? In this article, we argue that something additional – something more generative and hopeful – is also required. In response, we introduce ‘critical utopian policy analysis’ (CUPA) a methodological elaboration of critical policy analysis (CPA) designed to support its use in both deconstructive and reconstructive policy efforts. This approach builds on the theoretical offerings of critical policy analysis, utopianism and prefiguration, to posit a methodological embrace of critique, imagination, enactment and play. It seeks to mobilise a complex nexus of affect – including heartbreak and hope – to motivate and support a range of intellectual undertakings and emancipatory politics.

The past decade has been marked by cuts in public funding of adult social care alongside an increased policy focus within the UK on extending working lives through ‘50 PLUS Choices’. This study uses the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009/10–2018/19) to examine the relationship between informal care provision and labour market participation. The analysis focusses on mid-life, a period of life course characterised by both the uptake of informal care provision responsibilities and withdrawal from the labour market. Across the observation period, employment increased amongst both mid-life carers and non-carers, but the gap widened – with carers being much less likely to be employed. Discrete-time survival models assess the effect of caregiving on the likelihood of changing from full-time to part-time work or leaving work altogether. A range of indicators of caregiving, including care intensity, type of care provided and relationship to the person cared for, are all associated with reduced employment. The analysis supports the argument that policies promoting higher labour force participation amongst older workers are incompatible with cuts in funding for adult social care; to realise ‘50 PLUS Choices’, older working carers need to be better supported in juggling the competing demands of care and work.

Welfare state attitudes make up an interactive feedback loop of defining popular legitimacy and future policy trajectories. Understanding attitudinal drivers is thus essential political knowledge. However, as existing research is mainly based on the work-nexus of welfare, this article expands the literature to the welfare state’s care-nexus, examining drivers of family policy attitudes. We argue that conventional attitude predictors of self-interest and ideology are insufficient to explain the attitudinal cleavage in family policy. Instead, justice perceptions in the division of physical and cognitive household labour represent an important normative battleground. We test this with Norwegian survey data (N = 3500), using a unique vignette experiment to operationalise justice perceptions. Findings show that individuals who do not perceive a disproportional household labour division as unfair prefer optional familialism within family policy. Individuals who do perceive unfairness in a disproportional household labour division prefer de-familialism, which facilitates gender equality in public and private spheres. This is consistently found for the physical division of labour, while the cognitive dimension seems less politicised. We conclude that the battleground for different family policy approaches is fundamentally normative and linked to justice considerations on gender roles.

The aim of this study was to understand how and why relational welfare works to support young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). It builds on research discussing the limitations of work-first and human capital strategies in social policy while responding to calls for theory-driven insights into initiatives that move beyond employability and rapid employment. The material for this realist evaluation includes programme documents, fieldnotes and 75 interviews with practitioners and participants in community-based multicomponent initiatives delivered by Swedish municipalities. These data were scrutinised against programme theories while integrating literature on relational welfare as underpinned by co-creation and capability approaches. The results illustrate how flexible, challenging and coordinated programming strengthen beings and doings of young people in NEET situations while improving their wellbeing by overcoming isolation and forming a future orientation. The study provides guidance for supporting NEET-situated young people through a relational approach to welfare. It also offers a model against which local initiatives provided to a youth group high on the policy agenda can be mapped.

Among the factors identified to account for non-take-up of social benefits, there has been limited research on ‘process costs’, particularly regarding the impact of geographic access. Using Israeli data on field office openings from 1993 to 2021, this paper investigates the impact of geographic access on the take-up of the five largest social security programs in Israel. Based on staggered openings and closings of social security field offices, we find that geographic access has no significant impact on the take-up of either automatic enrollment programs, such as child allowances, or non-automatic programs, such as disability benefits. These findings suggest that the effect of geographic access on the take-up of social benefits may have been overstated in previous studies. We propose the following hypothesis to explain the surprising findings: If enhanced geographic access is driven by political favoritism, opening of new service points may lead to the misallocation of resources and, in effect, increase administrative burdens, thereby undermining rather than improving the take-up of social benefits.

This article addresses whether responses to COVID-19 created opportunities for future policy change. We explore this matter by presenting a framework rooted in political economy and the literature on pandemics. We argue that the opportunities created by emergency responses are context-specific and that narratives, policy tools, and pro-equity state actors are variables that mediate emergency responses and future opportunities. We ground our analytical contribution on the emergency cash transfers deployed during 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak in two contrasting Central American countries, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The paper promotes further policy discussion on the opportunities for progressive change in unequal contexts.

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.