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Authors:Dominic Durocher Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. In the last decades, several countries introduced new income-tested child benefits and targeted in-work tax credits to boost the income of low-income families. Inspired by the power resource theory, I postulate that left-wing governments tend to increase benefits to low-income families because their ideology favours redistribution and to consolidate the vote of low-income families, but that both right- and left-wing governments increase benefits for middle-income families. The impact of left-wing governments should be stronger in countries with a weak bargaining system as social partners are unable to reduce inequalities between families. To demonstrate this argument, I use statistical analyses based on OECD data to measure the effect of government ideology and corporatism on the level of benefits received by low- and middle-income families in OECD countries from 1982 to 2019. The results indicate that left-wing parties have a significant impact on benefits received by low-income families, but not on benefits received by middle-income families. Also, even though corporatism is associated with different types of child benefits, it does not influence the relationship between left-wing governments and benefits received by low-income families. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-08-23T07:11:40Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241240317
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Authors:José Andrés Fernández-Cornejo, Cristina Castellanos-Serrano, Eva Del Pozo-García, Lorenzo Escot Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. We use Sen’s capability approach to identify factors able to increase the effective freedom of working parents when deciding the length of their parental leave. We conducted a factorial survey experiment (FSE) with a Spanish sample of employees aged between 25 and 45. Respondents were asked to imagine that they were first-time parents and several descriptions of hypothetical situations or vignettes (where aspects of the leave system, workplace and family environment were randomly varied) were presented to them. Our goal was to identify the causal effect of a number of dimensions on their hypothetical decisions about the total number of weeks they would be on parental leave. A longer statutory duration and a higher replacement rate (of the paid part of the leave), having job security, and a workplace with friendly practices and cultures, were found to have a significant positive impact on the duration of parental leave. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-08-20T05:11:59Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241258598
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Authors:Veronika J Knize, Markus Wolf Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Active labour market programmes (ALMPs) should help young adults who collect welfare benefits ‘get back on track’. Despite the recent proliferation of research on ALMPs, only scant attention has been paid to their employment quality effects. Aiming to fill this gap, this article evaluates the long-term effects of German ALMPs on young adults’ employment quality. We measure employment quality with two indicators: one on whether someone has a job with earnings below the low wage threshold and the other on whether they have a job with earnings above the low wage threshold. These measures help us assess whether ALMPs prevent young adults from being at risk of poverty again. In addition, we study whether ALMP effects vary by social origin. We distinguish young adults by whether their families collected benefits when they were adolescents, as a marker for disadvantaged social origin. We analyse in-firm training and one-euro jobs as examples for enabling and workfare programmes, which exist across other welfare states as well. Empirically, we apply an entropy balancing approach to a self-drawn sample from registry data to analyse ALMP treatment effects. Results show that in-firm training enhances young adults’ employment quality in the long run. The effects tend to be lower for those from disadvantaged families though, indicating that disadvantages embedded in social origin remain. The workfare programme harms participants’ employment quality, with those less disadvantaged suffering the greatest damage. Overall, our research provides evidence that in-firm training effectively enables young adults to find a job of higher quality, addressing their risk of social exclusion and proving useful in promoting upward social mobility. Nonetheless, the article also raises urgent issues concerning how the needs of those most vulnerable can be addressed by social policy. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-08-03T06:51:49Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241268442
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Authors:Carmen Walenta-Bergmann, Tobias Wiß Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Country comparisons, often suffering from unobserved heterogeneity and obscuring subnational variation, dominate the social policy literature. However, the subnational level is better suited to reduce the omitted variable bias. This article distinguishes between social consumption and social investment policies and investigates their determinants at the subnational level. Following the literature across countries, we test the role of incumbent parties’ ideology, but for within-country variation in social policy. Austria is a case in point because states have discretion in social policy (e.g., regarding public childcare and social assistance). Panel regressions covering all nine states in Austria for the years 1991 to 2019 reveal that the cabinet share of Social-Democrats increases social investment spending, while the Christian-Democratic party decreases it, and the populist radical right party reduces expenses for social consumption. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-06-21T07:21:39Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241258605
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Authors:Thomas Eichhorn, Claudia Zerle-Elsäßer Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Previous literature on paternal involvement emphasizes the influence of fathers’ socialization contexts, considering either welfare policies (Hipp and Leuze, 2015) or experiences with their own fathers (Brown et al., 2018; Parke, 1995). In this study, we combine those two branches of research and examine how fathers’ and their fathers’ (grandfathers’) socialization experiences (parental leave regulations in their early adulthood as an example of (de-)familization policies (Lohmann and Zagel, 2016)) predict paternal involvement today. To measure paternal involvement, we create an indicator for involvement that covers Lamb et al. (1985) three aspects of direct interaction, responsibility, and availability and the fact that a father has taken paternal leave for at least one of his children or not. We use the fact that a substantial proportion of the fathers in the German, national survey AID:A 2019 (Kuger et al., 2020) were socialized in another welfare state regime (6.3% of fathers have a direct and another 13.5% have an indirect migration background (their fathers were born in another country) covering birth cohorts from the 1970s to the 1990s; total N = 1053). We then add context-related information on their (fathers’ and grandfathers’) countries of origin from the OECD family database and estimate an SEM model to test potential direct and indirect effects. We find that more educated fathers who experienced extended parental leave regulations are more involved fathers today. Our results support, thus, that welfare state conditions influence individuals’ behaviour while education is a relevant moderator in this relationship. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-05-17T04:09:58Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241251993
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Authors:Daniel Dinale Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article interrogates the impacts of different types of family benefits expenditures on the positive relationship between female employment and fertility rates in developed welfare states. It does this by theorizing how these family benefits align with welfare state regimes’ preferences for different normative gender-role ideologies. Rather than treating family benefits as a monolith, this article investigates the impact of disaggregated expenditures in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) family policy database (1. services and in-kind benefits, 2. child-related cash benefits and 3. tax-based financial support for children) on both female employment and fertility rates. This is done using pooled time-series analysis covering the period 2000–9. The analysis yields evidence that expenditure most reflecting a ‘full egalitarian’ gender ideology including service and in-kind benefit provision has the most positive association with female employment and fertility due to an emphasis on defamiliarization. The picture for child-related cash benefits is mixed due to the presence of cash transfer provisions not employment-contingent captured in the indicator. In contrast, tax-based financial support for children harms female employment, reflecting a maternalistic ‘traditional’ ideological orientation, but is positive for fertility rates indicating a moderate pro-natal effect of tax-based financial support for children. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-05-17T04:03:58Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241252008
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Authors:Miriam Laschinski Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Growing care dependencies among the elderly due to population ageing in Europe challenge the labour-market participation of informal caregivers. While familiarized care regimes incentivize family caregiving by providing many cash-for-care-benefits, resulting in reduced labour supply, defamiliarized care regimes allocate more public spending to care infrastructure, alleviating the care responsibilities placed on family members. At the same time, care provision on the micro-level is distributed unequally across gender, age, and socioeconomic status. The question then emerges: Does the labour-market participation of informal caregivers vary between and within countries depending on the social-expenditure policy of welfare states' To answer this research question, a multilevel design was used, employing SHARE data and macro-indicators from OECD and Eurostat databases. The results reveal higher probabilities of labour-market participation for informal caregivers in general when social expenditures on formal care infrastructure are higher. However, labour-market participation was observed as being unequally distributed among the heterogeneous group of persons with and without caregiving duties. Women and individuals of lower socioeconomic status did not benefit from social expenditures in the same way as their counterparts, leading to lower levels of labour-market participation. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-05-16T10:57:21Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241251990
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Authors:Alexander Horn, Sebastian Kohl Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Modern welfare states compete with private providers of welfare in offering economic security. This is most evident in the case of pensions competing with life insurance and private pensions as well as of public health insurance competing with private insurance providers. The common view of this public–private relationship is one of a trade-off: longitudinally, political scientists describe how retrenchment was pushed by privatized welfare, whereas economists trace the crowding-out of private to public welfare provisions. Cross-sectionally, they claim that countries have lower public spending levels because they have a large private sector. We suggest a more nuanced view. Drawing on a new long-run panel data of public pension and private life insurance expenditures and contributions in 20 OECD countries since Bismarck to the current day, we show that in the postwar years a cross-sectional trade-off emerged, which then faded. Longitudinally, complementary relationships of public and private provision growth have become the norm. We argue theoretically and show empirically that trade-offs only occur if governments still hold (waning) anti-interventionist and pro-market views. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-05-04T11:34:51Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241245656
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Authors:Fiona Gogescu Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article analyses how educational and initial vocational training systems in Europe vary regarding the way in which they structure educational routes for pupils of different academic ability. The study uses cluster analysis to explore the degree of similarity between 25 European countries, including variables related to: stratification within compulsory education; vocational orientation; links between initial vocational education and the labour market; transitions from secondary education; stratification within tertiary education; and links between educational qualifications and labour market outcomes. I identify three clusters of countries that have distinct patterns of stratification. This article contributes to the literature on educational regimes and school-to-work transitions by adding countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and integrating multiple dimensions pertaining to the link between educational and social stratification. Thus, it develops a more encompassing representation of the architecture of educational pathways in different European countries. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-04-27T12:20:11Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241240966
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Authors:Katy Jones, Calum Carson Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This chapter explores employer perspectives on the extension of behavioural conditionality to working social security claimants (‘in-work conditionality’). As policymakers across Europe and other developed nations have pursued increasingly interventionist approaches to activating the unemployed through conditional welfare policies, the UK has gone a significant and ‘unprecedented’ step further by requiring those in receipt of in-work benefits to demonstrate their efforts to increase their working hours and/or pay. As the actors ultimately in control over the jobs people can access and progress in, understanding employer perspectives on this new policy development is critical, which, however, has so far been overlooked by policymakers and researchers. We address this omission through presenting original analysis of 84 semi-structured interviews conducted with a diverse group of employers. We find that while the UK’s Work First approach to activation has seemingly encountered little resistance from employers to date, this new Work First, Work More approach may be a step too far. We contribute theoretically by identifying a potential role for employers as latent path disruptors in policy development, and challenge the commonly-held assumption that employers are typically supportive of extensions of behavioural conditionality to social security claimants. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-03-01T06:21:29Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241232817
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Authors:András Gábos, Barbara Binder, Réka Branyiczki, István György Tóth Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Despite the rise in employment, consistently high EU-average poverty rates continue to generate debates about the factors that explain the level and changes in the relative poverty rate, both within and across countries. Assuming a strong negative correlation between poverty and employment, the article investigates the role of four mechanisms responsible for this blurred relationship. Using decomposition analysis and macro-level regression analysis, we investigate the extent to which (i) the distribution of employment across households with different levels of work intensity, (ii) the expansion of non-standard work, (iii) the change in the effectiveness of social welfare systems, and (iv) the change in median income and the corresponding shift in the poverty threshold have contributed to changes in relative income poverty in the last decades. We found that employment growth benefits poverty reduction, but this positive effect was partially offset by the precarious characteristics of some newly created jobs. If the distribution of jobs had favoured the jobless more in the pre-crisis period, the relative income poverty rate would have been lower. Although the share of persons in jobless households decreased during the recovery years, their risk of poverty increased due to the retrenchment of social transfers during and after the Great Recession. Furthermore, the use of a floating threshold, which is linked to changes in median income, underestimates the strength of the relationships between poverty, employment and social transfers: when the poverty threshold is kept fixed, not only do the dynamics of poverty look different, but the estimated coefficients are considerably larger. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-02-29T07:48:28Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241232272
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Authors:Karen Hermans, Bea Cantillon, Sarah Marchal Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. In recent decades, disappointing poverty trends and welfare state limitations in many European countries – including constraints on minimum income benefits – have paved the way for a larger role of the third sector. An interesting but controversial form of third-sector in-kind support is food aid provision. In Europe, food aid is, so far, a non-rights-based practice displaying worrisome discretionary and stigmatizing characteristics. Yet, the phenomenon of food aid in Europe has spread, professionalized, and penetrated the institutions of the welfare state. This raises the question if, how and to what extent food aid plays a role in bypassing structural constraints on minimum income protection. This article applies an exploratory case study approach to estimate the monetary value of food aid in relation to statutory minimum incomes in four EU-countries. We use cross-nationally comparable food reference budgets to price food aid packages in Belgium, Finland, Hungary and Spain. The results show that food aid, although not sufficient to close the at-risk-of-poverty gap, is non-trivial for some European households. In Spain and Belgium food aid packages can reach up to €100 a month (expressing 7% to 11% of respective minimum income benefit levels). Importantly, we perceive (formalized) cooperation and interaction between local welfare agencies and food charities in all countries, suggesting that welfare state actors use non-rights-based food aid for filling gaps in the social safety net. The large between- and within-country variation of the monetary values of food aid packages points, however, to food aid as a problematic discretionary practice. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-02-21T06:49:22Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241231889
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Authors:Peter Starke, Georg Wenzelburger Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. When it comes to the relationship between social policy and penal policy, existing scholarship often focuses on the penal–welfare tradeoff, according to which countries with large and generous welfare states tend to have lower incarceration rates and less harsh treatment of offenders. We know much less about the relationship between the punitive turn in criminal justice and the use of discipline within social policy. Has there been a parallel trend of law-and-order policies and stricter benefit conditionality, a kind of ‘criminalization’ of welfare beneficiaries, as critical scholarship suggests' We test this idea for the first time with quantitative data, using public spending on public order and safety and unemployment benefit conditionality data for 18 rich democracies between 1990 and 2012, that is, the period when a punitive turn as well as the rise of activation and workfare is said to have taken place. Contrary to the critical literature, we do not find evidence of parallel trends toward more discipline in both areas, but rather a negative relationship of ‘communicating vessels’, where a greater use of disciplinary tools in social policy is associated with stagnating or even shrinking spending on police and prisons. Moreover, this pattern tends to emerge under conditions of higher welfare state generosity. These findings have important implications about the role of state ‘discipline’ in contemporary policymaking. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-02-20T07:26:43Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241231885
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Authors:Patrick Clasen Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Scholars have so far not paid sufficient attention to the role of attributed responsibility of countries when they need to explain variations of European fiscal solidarity. Do citizens consider the responsibility of other countries when expressing solidarity with them' This article advances the argument that individuals apply similar heuristics to countries as to other individuals. When expressing solidarity with another country, individuals rely on cues about deservingness. The role of responsibility attributions is tested in this article using logistic regression on survey data from 10 EU countries. Results show that citizens in rich welfare states reduce their solidarity for other countries if they deem them responsible for their own crises. This suggests that rich welfare states hinder the development of solidarity beyond their national boundaries. This research contributes to our understanding of the role of deservingness attributions in European solidarity, as well as to our understanding of the role of the welfare state in solidarity. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-02-14T06:27:16Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287241229669
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Authors:Uta Brehm, Nadja Milewski Abstract: Journal of European Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Research on reconciling family and employment debates if maternal part-time employment works as ‘stepping stone’ to full-time employment or as gateway to a long-term ‘mommy track’. We analyse how mothers’ transition from part-time to full-time employment is shaped by changing reconciliation legislations and how this is moderated by reconciliation-relevant factors like individual behaviours and macro conditions. We extend the literature on work–family reconciliation by investigating mothers’ employment behaviour after the birth of their last child, i.e., after the family formative phase. We draw upon Germany with its considerable regional and historical heterogeneity. Using event history methods on SOEP-data, we observe mothers who (re)enter part-time employment (i.e., up to 30 weekly working hours) after their last childbirth. Results suggest that the impact of reconciliation legislations depends on the moderation by other factors. Recent reconciliation-friendly legislations may have contributed to the polarization of maternal employment patterns: more and less employment-oriented mothers diverge sooner after childbirth than before. Legislations co-occur with increases both in childcare institutions and part-time culture, but their moderation effects compete. Hence, boosting part-time work as either a ‘stepping stone’ or a ‘mommy track’ requires a deep understanding of the mechanisms behind legislations as well as more explicit policy incentives. Citation: Journal of European Social Policy PubDate: 2024-01-30T06:43:08Z DOI: 10.1177/09589287231224607