This article examines the potential impact of institutional change on popular welfare support. The encompassing welfare state of Sweden provides an interesting case where the privatization of social service delivery has been widespread over the last decades. We use survey data from five rounds of the Swedish Welfare State Survey (1992, 1997, 2002, 2006 and 2010) in order to study how public preferences for the financing and organization of welfare services have changed over time. Based on a theory describing an ideal-typical pattern of public support for an encompassing welfare model, we derive three types of public preferences: support for a pure state model, a pure market model and a mixed model (welfare services are funded by taxes but provided by private firms). We begin by tracking the development of these ideal-typical attitude patterns between 1992 and 2010. We then investigate how preference patterns vary across municipalities displaying different degrees of privatization of social service delivery. Our results show that welfare support among Swedes over the last decades is better characterized as dynamic rather than stable. Swedes seem to take an overall more ideologically based position on the role of the welfare state over time. The share of respondents expressing such ideologically based preferences has increased from 54 per cent in 1992 to 78 per cent in 2010. This change is principally manifested in increased support for the state and mixed models. This trend seems to be parallel to the increasing share of private welfare service providers over the last decade. We also find a link between the municipal degree of privatization and support for our three ideal-typical welfare models. Public support for a mixed welfare model and, to some extent, a market model, is comparatively stronger in municipalities where welfare services to a large extent are carried out by private actors. Conversely, data shows that public support for the traditional Swedish state model is more widespread in municipalities having a low degree of welfare services privatization. Lastly, we discuss some theoretical implications of our findings.

The working-class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle-classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle-class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle-class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life-course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle-class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long-term unemployed) the ‘inducement’ of – or assistance for – individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of ‘individual responsibility’ seems to find some resonance among the middle-class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility.

This article reports on a pilot study examining funeral welfare for citizens from low income backgrounds. Through a review of funeral welfare provision in 12 capitalist democratic countries it seeks to inform the current system of state support in Britain, arguing that insufficient attention has been given to funeral costs as a policy issue. Mindful of the British welfare state's original ‘cradle to grave’ ethos, such attention is ever more pressing in light of rising funeral costs, an ageing population and projected increases in the death rate. Arguing that funeral costs are an issue of income support, the article draws on Esping-Andersen's threefold welfare-regime typology to situate the British system within a comparative study of funeral welfare that identifies similarities and differences both within and between the three welfare-regime types. On the basis of an empirical example, the article further argues that systems of funeral welfare reflect the relationship between culture, politics and local practice. The findings indicate that the British system is hampered by a discourse of welfare dependency rather than entitlement, which stigmatises those who need support with funeral costs at a time when they are under pressure to ensure that the deceased person receives a ‘dignified’ send-off.

The emphasis placed on choice of social care provider means that there is an increasing need to furnish service users with reliable and up-to-date information on provider quality. In England, encouraging users to leave online feedback on providers is seen as one of the ways of improving the supply of information. However, using these channels for social care raises a number of issues, for example, the challenge of generating enough content to be of value, and the need to protect the anonymity of potentially vulnerable users. This article aims to summarize these issues, by drawing upon the experience of an established ratings site (TripAdvisor), and of heath service rating systems, as well as literature on decision-making and behaviour across social care and related sectors. The article concludes that online ratings can assist users to choose providers, however, they will need to be supported by carefully designed processes to maximize their usefulness.

This study contributes to the welfare regime literature by analyzing unemployment compensation programmes – unemployment insurance (UI)/assistance (UA) programmes and redundancy pay schemes – of welfare state/occupational welfare regimes. It covers 15 countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) selected from Southern European, Liberal, Continental-corporatist and Social Democratic country clusters. In contrast to the common argument that Southern European countries have underdeveloped formal unemployment compensation systems, this study argues that they (especially in Spain, Portugal, and to some extent Italy) are comparable in strength to those in Continental-corporatist countries if occupational welfare programmes – notably redundancy pay – are considered alongside welfare state programmes for unemployment protection. The study also outlines the characteristics of redundancy pay schemes in the four country clusters and shows how different redundancy pay schemes are linked to UI/UA schemes in these clusters.

This article compares the processes of reforming sickness insurance in Norway and Sweden. Despite the many similarities between the Norwegian and Swedish welfare states, they have taken different paths when it comes to reforming their sickness insurance systems. In the period between 1990 and 2010 Sweden changed its wage replacement levels and levels of employer financing several times, while in Norway they remain basically unchanged since 1978, notwithstanding many reform initiatives by political authorities. Why have the two cases evolved so differently? We address this question by using Peter Starke's review of the retrenchment literature which outlines four major strands of theorizing the politics of welfare reform: neo-functionalism, conflict theories, institutionalist theories and discourse theory. Rather than treating these as providing competing explanations, the article suggests that elements from all perspectives bring insights to the case. The need for policy reform must always be communicated in a way that can be understood and approved in order to materialize as actual policy change. But discursive change and apparently seductive frames will not always be enough. This comparative analysis illustrates that the chance of success for new frames or discourses depends on the institutional, political and functional context into which they are inserted. Similar attempts at framing the need for reform and cutbacks have had different effects in the two countries depending on the character of the counter forces and extant frames reformers are up against. On the other hand, over time discourses and frames also shape institutions and political relations.

The quantitative strand of social policy research suffers from a triple deficit: analyses of aggregate expenditure dominate, most of the few studies of replacement rates focus on unemployment or sickness benefits while pensions are excluded, and the interdependence between public and private pension plans is often ignored. This article addresses the said deficits, first, by discussing the pension sectors' theoretical peculiarities and by proposing two hypotheses: one on the role played by political parties in implementing public pension retrenchment, and the second on their role in extending private pension plans. Second, the article presents regression results of public pension replacement rate changes in 18 developed democracies. The findings show considerably smaller cuts to pensions than to unemployment or sickness benefits, and striking differences regarding partisan effects between the sectors. Lastly, the article assesses partisan effects on private pension plans, detecting some rather surprising effects. Most noteworthy is the fact that those parties which reduced public pension generosity during the 1990s (i.e. Social Democrats) cannot claim responsibility for compensating these cuts by eliciting higher private engagement.

A recent thread of debate in social policy research has been the ‘discovery’ of welfare services. Previous comparative studies in this field have been largely erratic and have led to different results. This ambiguity is mainly due to flaws inherent in the data sets. In order to overcome these problems, this article uses an alternative approach of operationalizing welfare services. Employment patterns in the welfare sector provide a holistic picture of welfare services regarding quantity, kind, and organization. Cluster analysis leads to a four-cluster structure that bears high resemblance to the conventional welfare regime typology by Esping-Andersen and its subsequent advancements. These findings are set in the context of the welfare regimes literature in order to enhance our understanding of the functioning of welfare regimes. The study suggests that the ideological orientation of the welfare state is a good starting point for a holistic framework of welfare regimes combining the transfer and the service component.

In the context of inconclusive evidence on the extrinsic successes of quasi-markets, policy defences of school choice and competition in education have often discussed the intrinsic, empowering value of choice for consumers, arguing that school choice for parents is ‘what people want’. Discourses often imply that choice is desired for its own sake rather than merely as a means by which families can escape what are deemed to be poor quality schools. Support for an idealistic, abstract notion of ‘choice’ is also taken to imply support for quasi-markets overall and is not considered alongside possible competing values that people may hold at the same time as they value choice. Additionally, views of parents are often examined without considering possible differences in views between parents and non-parents. Contributing to debates about how far a public desire exists for quasi-markets in education, this article draws on data from newly designed questions fielded as part of the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey. The article finds that while choice ‘in the abstract’ is supported widely by both parents and non-parents (albeit slightly more so by parents), a valuing of choice among the British public appears to be more instrumental than intrinsic – potentially problematic given evidence on the extrinsic benefits of quasi-markets is mixed. Support for choice is tempered among parents and non-parents by clear opposition to vouchers, school diversity, government spending on transport costs to facilitate choice and by strong support for the idea of sending children to the ‘nearest state school’.

Social policy development and reform in corporatist welfare states often follows a pattern of subsequent collectivization and de-collectivization. This has to do, the article argues, with the social problems these phases address. Early social policy development forms a response to Olson-type collective action problems that organized actors (labour and employers' organizations) in the field experience: state-obliged benefits solve free rider problems, while bipartite administration allows labour and employers' organizations to organize their constituencies. This solution to Olson-type collective action problems, however, also constitutes an Ostrom-type collective action problem. Such a system functions as a common pool resource. Individual benefit take-up is experienced as free and the costs of benefit take-up are collectivized in the common pool. The article illustrates this pattern with reference to Dutch disability insurance.

Devolved government was established in Northern Ireland in 1999 at the same time as Scotland and Wales with a varying range of powers, particularly over the major areas of social policy including education. Devolution in Northern Ireland was set up on the basis of statutory power-sharing in the core executive with a number of mechanisms to promote involvement by all sections of the community through their political representatives. This marked a departure from the traditional majoritarian and hierarchical model of UK government. The operation of devolved government in Northern Ireland requires a consensus on major policy items requiring legislation. The main aim of the article is to assess whether or not there is a devolved policy style in Northern Ireland and to compare this policy style with the findings of similar analysis in Scotland and Wales. Consideration is then given to the impact of both the distinctive policy processes which reflect the consociational nature of the Good Friday Agreement and wider social, political and administrative factors. Decision-making on education policy is a totally devolved function and thus serves as an important example of autonomous policy formulation and policy-making. The three main topics of current policy debate in education are selected for analysis to determine the nature of the decision-making process and the existence of a distinct devolved policy style.

Debates around welfare change have tended to concentrate on the balance between market and state provision. Although there is increasing reference to a mixed economy of welfare, this generally signifies a greater emphasis on a third sector of voluntary/community level provision. However, the family sphere has been, and still remains, an important and dynamic source of welfare provision across changing regimes and between generations. With this as background, the article addresses three particular questions. First, how has the role of families in the welfare mix changed over time? Second, how do family ‘strategies’ adapt to structural changes in order to maximize collective/individual benefits in certain areas and how do these strategies evolve over generations? Third, is such family engagement in welfare influenced by policy shifts appropriately conceptualized as ‘re-familization’ or ‘de-familization'? These issues are explored in the comparative socio-economic and cultural contexts of China and Japan and draw on qualitative research with three generations of families in Shanghai and Tokyo.

The modernization of public services, with its emphasis on managerialism, choice, co-production and outcome focused service delivery, has been implemented to a certain extent in both England and Wales. Indeed, the welfare states in both countries share a great deal, particularly in relation to policy objectives and the expectations of citizens. Devolution has chiefly meant that the instruments used to deliver policy have separated, although it remains unclear whether this amounts to formal divergence. What is also unclear is to what extent have the experiences of those living within the policy environment in both countries separated or diverged? This article addresses this question using qualitative data composed of interviews with policy actors in six rural areas of England and Wales. By focusing on the discourses of people involved in modernizing and providing services for older people in rural areas, we bring out the impact of modernization for older people. What we show is that modernization engages both service users and the wider population who may one day become service users. But the emphasis on these groups unfolds in different ways in England and Wales. In England, where there has been a commitment to a customer citizen, policy at the local level has emphasized re-enablement, community development and individual responsibility. In Wales, where modernization has focused on collaboration and citizenship, local policies have focused on service users, and on engagement with the voluntary sector. In effect, the policy environment provides a different context for the experience of ageing in both countries.

In recent years there has been increased interest in outcome-based social policy-making and management. The UK has been in the forefront of this movement but similar movements have been identified internationally. This interest in outcome-based decision-making has been given particular impetus through the ‘results’-based movement in evaluation and performance management since the 1980s, which has increased in scope over time, slowly changing its emphasis from cost reduction and measuring outputs to measuring outcomes. This change has been widely welcomed by policymakers, practitioners and academics. However, there is evidence that the reality is often rather less than the rhetoric. Moreover, the ‘attribution problem’ of attributing changes in outcomes to specific social policies has remained a major issue. The conceptual solution of constructing ‘cause-and-effect’ models, imported from the policy evaluation field, has only recently become common for operationalising these models. This article outlines the evolution of interest in outcome-based social policy-making up to recent times and the growing realization of the importance of the attribution problem. It then outlines both how the ‘cause-and-effect’ policy modelling approach can partially tackle the attribution problem, but also its inherent limitations. Lastly, the article uses several case studies in current UK social policy-making to demonstrate the potential importance of the reasoning embedded within cause-and-effect models but also the dangers in policy-making which adopts this approach without understanding its conceptual basis or in fields where it is inappropriate, given the current state of our knowledge of social policy systems.

Mirroring changes across nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, recent UK governments have redrawn lone parents' entitlement to social assistance benefits ever tighter around participation in the labour market. A radical shift since 2008 has been the gradual transfer of most non-employed lone parents into the ‘activating’ Jobseekers' Allowance (JSA) regime. The enhanced conditionality requirements of this JSA regime have been justified by both paternalistic and contractualist arguments but, however justified, are built on the premise that behavioural factors drive lone parent employment outcomes, a view made increasingly forcefully under the current Coalition government. This article uses up-to-date administrative data at local authority level across England to provide a geographical perspective into the sub-national changes in lone parent employment outcomes since the transfer to JSA from 2008, as well as the relevant importance of the alternative structural and behavioural accounts to these outcomes. The findings suggest that the JSA transfer has increased lone parent employment, that structural rather than behavioural drivers are more relevant causal factors and that there is good reason to be concerned about the effect of the reforms on the well-being of lone parents and their children.

This article contributes to the welfare state regime literature from a substantive and methodological perspective. At a very abstract level we confirm the relevance of the welfare state regime theory and stability for the period from 1971 to the end of the 1990s. However, by analyzing family policy and unemployment protection, we observe a dual transformation of the welfare state, consisting of a trend towards a ‘socialization’ of family policies and a retrenchment in unemployment insurance benefits. Our Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) of the two policy domains captures the multi-dimensionality of the decommodification and defamilialization concepts and visualizes welfare state developments over time in a Cartesian space. This dynamic analysis provides us with a nuanced understanding of welfare state regime stability and change.

Across the public sector there is concern that service uptake is inequitably distributed by socio-economic circumstances and that public provision exacerbates the existence of inequalities either because services are not allocated by need or because of differential patterns of uptake between the most and least affluent groups.

A concept that offers potential to understand access and utilization is ‘candidacy’ which has been used to explain access to, and utilization of, healthcare. The concept suggests that an individual's identification of his or her ‘candidacy’ for health services is structurally, culturally, organizationally and professionally constructed, and helps to explain why those in deprived circumstances make less use of services than the more affluent.

In this article we assess the fit of candidacy to other public services using a Critical Interpretive Synthesis of three case studies literatures relating to: domestic abuse, higher education and environmental services.

We find high levels of congruence between ‘candidacy’ and the sampled literatures on access/utilization of services. We find, however, that the concept needs to be refined. In particular, we distinguish between micro, meso and macro factors that play into the identification, sustaining and resolution of candidacy, and demonstrate the plural nature of candidacies. We argue that this refined model of candidacy should be tested empirically beyond and within health. More specifically, in the current economic context, we suggest that it becomes imperative to better understand how access to public services is influenced by multiple factors including changing discourses of deservedness and fairness, and by stringent reductions in the public purse.

In recent years, the role of voluntary organizations in welfare partnership has received considerable critical attention from scholars working in the field. While mainstream debates have valued state–voluntary sector partnership as participatory governance, critical studies have argued that it leads voluntary organizations to serve as a shadow state. The present study, however, contends that partnership does not necessarily entail participatory welfare or the complete subordination of the voluntary sector to the state's bureaucratic system. Rather, as new street-level bureaucrats, voluntary organizations can exercise a degree of autonomy on the frontline despite the bureaucratic constraints engendered by partnership. Through an ethnographic analysis of Korean community organizations engaged as frontline agencies in a welfare-to-work partnership, this study unveils how the former have recreated democratic and inclusive environments in a particular policy setting by organizing non-work activities and transferring administrative authority to recipients. Delineating such street-level practices, this article demonstrates that state–voluntary sector partnerships may be sites of struggle where voluntary organizations continuously strive to actualize participatory governance in diverse and indirect ways.

This article explores how caseworkers are re-constructing disability in the Danish welfare system and disciplining themselves and clients according to the active labour policy paradigm. Combining Foucault's ideas about discipline with Maynard-Moody and Musheno's method of interpreting street-level bureaucrats' stories (Foucault 1977; Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003), we analyze caseworkers' stories about their clients, fellow caseworkers and themselves to understand how they practice the ideology behind active labour policy. Our analysis uses Møller's (2009) interviews with 24 Danish caseworkers who administer social welfare and sick leave benefits based on disability as the primary eligibility criterion. We selected stories told by caseworkers that exemplify archetypes of good and bad citizens, good and bad clients, and good and bad caseworkers. Through interpretative analysis, we elucidate how caseworkers make sense of active labour policy and internalize the pressures of managerial reforms to discipline both citizens and each other.

Shifts in public policy towards an increasing focus on risk have been deemed problematic at a number of levels, particularly the tendency for concerns over reputational risk to institutions to trump the interests and needs of service-users. This article explores the tension between these two dimensions, of risk and need, in a case study of local mental health services – a setting where conflicting objectives to manage risk and meet need are apparent. Media-driven pressure to ward against the ‘risk’ represented by service-users tends towards more coercive policy which may obstruct the meeting of need, which in turn may undermine service-user engagement and hinder risk management. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with service-users, professionals and managers, the article explores the process of trust and its facilitative role in meeting need and managing risk. Findings suggest that while existing foci on risk are at times counter-productive, trust plays a significant role in service-users' initial and ongoing engagement, communication and co-operation with professionals. Yet inherent obstacles to trust within mental healthcare contexts remain, due to cultural pressures on professionals, the nature of the illness experience and negative past experiences of in-patient care.

We investigate population groups' attitude regarding inequality reduction in post-Soviet transitional countries of the Baltic, Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as the Slavic countries and Moldova. Empirical evidence presented in this article demonstrates that despite skyrocketing inequality, erosion of social provisions and efforts to introduce an individualistic market economy ideology during the last 15 years, overall support for redistribution and welfare state efforts to counterbalance rising inequality remained strongly legitimized among citizens in all post-Soviet countries. Nevertheless, there are differences between population groups in attitude: the older, the less educated, the poor and women express more support for redistribution; while the younger, the better educated, the rich and men tend to not support redistribution. Populations in transitional countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia that face higher inequality and less effective redistribution policies expressed a strong desire for more redistribution and more active social welfare policies.

Fiscal pressure and demographic change lead governments to seek ways of reducing state expenditure on pensions. Individuals are asked to take more responsibility, and funded, supplementary pension schemes have been established in many countries. This article looks at schemes that are voluntary – the NEST or Personal Accounts scheme in Britain and the Riester Pension scheme in Germany. It examines the debate about whether it is worthwhile for some people to participate in pension schemes that are not mandatory – particularly those with low incomes and/or potentially broken careers. The small pensions they accumulate in such schemes merely offset entitlements to means-tested pension benefits, leaving them no better off in old age. Concerns about the behavioural consequences of pension means-testing are not new. Nonetheless, few policymakers have been willing to look at when and how such concerns were expressed in the context of voluntary pension savings. Equally, they have seldom been prepared to explain the costs involved in guaranteeing savings-based pensions or the implications that the lack of offering such a guarantee might have for individual behaviour. The state has sought for people to take greater ‘self-responsibility’ for their retirement income, but many people wish for some certainty with respect to the pensions they can expect. These goals might well be in conflict. Whether the ‘state pension for the 21st century’, as proposed by the UK government, will succeed in satisfying the objectives both of the state and of pension savers remains an open question.

This article surveys recent developments in relation to the dimensions of ethnicity and ethnic disadvantage in social policy research and practice, with a focus on social care. While there has been limited increase in attention to ethnicity within general policy discussion and increasing sophistication within specialist debates, advances in theory and methodology have largely failed to penetrate the research mainstream, let alone policy or practice. This is a long-standing problem. We advocate more focused consideration of ethnicity and ethnic disadvantage at all levels. Failure to do so creates the risk of social policy research being left behind in understanding rapid changes in ethnic minority demographics and patterns of migration, with increasing disadvantage to minorities.

The article analyses arguments for reform of public sector pension schemes by the UK Coalition government on the grounds that existing provision is ‘unfair’. Three dimensions of ‘fairness’ are discussed. That between public and private sector provision; between the costs to public sector employees and other taxpayers; and between members of public sector schemes. The article argues that there are serious weaknesses in the Coalition position on each of these dimensions of ‘fairness’. It suggests that these weaknesses are rooted in the discussion of public sector pensions in isolation from the overall pattern of occupational pension provision in the UK and that a more satisfactory analysis requires reference to principles of distributive justice.