The article provides a resource‐based perspective on the polymorphic regulatory welfare state. It shows regulatory and fiscal tools applied in the UK social security sector place demands on ...claimants' resources (i.e., possessions, labor and data) and simultaneously alter behavior in relation to these resources. The analysis exposes an operation that generates new and increasing resource pressures for claimants, providing a deeper conceptualization of a regulatory welfare state. It offers a new perspective on why regulatory and fiscal arrangements perpetuate existing inequalities and suggests an increase in welfare problems as the regulatory welfare state intensifies resource pressures.
Aging populations put pressure on the provision and financing of long-term care (LTC) services in many countries. The projected increase in LTC expenditures may in particular constitute a threat to ...the future sustainability of public budgets in welfare states, where LTC is financed through taxes. To accommodate the increasing number of 80+ year-olds in society, policy-makers and service administrators need a better understanding of care preferences among future older adults: What types of services do older citizens prefer most, and which factors shape their LTC preferences? A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was administered to a representative sample of the Danish population aged 54–64 from May to July 2019 (n = 1154), investigating which factors shape individuals' preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) for their future LTC. Our results reveal that respondents are willing to make additional out-of-pocket payments to supplement the care provided for free by the municipality. The WTP was highest for services such as receiving help from a regular care team ($129 per month) and an extra shower a week ($116 per month). Moreover, we find heterogeneous care preferences, with three user characteristics associated with higher WTP for services: higher education, high wealth, and a low trust in the publicly financed care system. Our results raise concerns that inequalities between relatively more- and less-resourceful older adults may increase in Scandinavian-type welfare states in the future. Such increasing inequality in service provision may undermine citizens’ trust in and support of the publicly financed care system.
•Resourceful older adults are willing to pay for improved long-term care services.•Willingness-to-pay is associated with low trust in the publicly financed care system.•Inequalities in the provision of long-term care may increase in the future.
Risks and Redistribution Rehm, Philipp
Comparative political studies,
07/2009, Letnik:
42, Številka:
7
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Much of the disagreement in the debate about globalization and its present or absent effects on the welfare state stems from competing assumptions about the individual-level determinants of ...redistributional preferences. This article calls for and provides testing of these causal mechanisms at the individual level. Traditional accounts suggest that risks at the industry level are important determinants of redistributional preferences. This article argues that risks at the occupational level should also be considered. A comprehensive new data set is used to test whether and what types of risks in the labor market play an important role in shaping preferences. Statistical analyses of public opinion surveys (European Social Survey) show strong evidence for the assumed causal mechanism. Contrary to much of the literature, but in line with this article's claims, it is the occupational, rather than the industry level, that is most important. The article lays out implications of these findings.
This article explores the idea that a UBI might be a superior mechanism in promoting reciprocity in society, looking at available data from social experiments with cash transfers. The results of ...these experiments show that when people receive an unconditional grant, they don’t usually stop working. Instead, they tend to diversify their time-use, opting to invest in caring for family members or in community activities. Experiences also shows that unlike conditional cash transfers, basic income is less stigmatizing to beneficiaries. These results and their interpretation allow us to expand our idea of productive contribution beyond paid employment. It also allows us to discuss the role of basic income as an essential policy for promoting reciprocity in a fairer society, instead of a mechanism that violates the norm of reciprocity.
Este artigo discute o RBI como política que promove a reciprocidade na sociedade, olhando para os dados disponíveis sobre experiências sociais de transferências monetárias, em particular experiências de rendimento mínimo garantido e de rendimento básico. Os resultados destas experiências mostram que com a atribuição do rendimento incondicional os indivíduos não deixam de investir o seu tempo num emprego mas antes diversificam as suas atividades, investindo no cuidado prestado a familiares ou em atividades na comunidade. As experiências indicam também que, contrariamente a propostas de rendimento mínimo condicional (ex. rendimento social de inserção), o rendimento básico promove a redução do estigma social. Estes resultados permitemnos expandir a nossa ideia de contribuição produtiva para além do emprego, e discutir o papel do RBI como um mecanismo que, ao invés de violar a norma de reciprocidade, funciona como política essencial para a sua promoção numa sociedade mais justa.
The impact of immigration and rising ethnic diversity on support for the welfare state has been the subject of intense debate. Previous European research has found little evidence for an aggregate ...impact of diversity on support for welfare, but has not tested for discrimination between claimants at the individual level. This article presents two survey experiments which demonstrate that, in the ethnically diverse, high immigration British context, white majority respondents favour co-ethnic welfare claimants over foreign-born or ethnically different claimants. Both race and migrant status trigger discrimination, and the impact of these is cumulative, so a foreign-born Muslim claimant suffers a ‘double disadvantage’. Three mechanisms contribute to discrimination. Ethnocentrism reduces willingness to support minority welfare claimants, but not co-ethnic claimants. Economic insecurity increases support for co-ethnic welfare claimants, but not minority claimants. The perception that welfare claimants are generally undeserving of help has a larger negative impact on minority claimants than on co-ethnic claimants.
Abstract
Scholars have long described the American penal state and welfare state as joined by a common logic of social marginalization. But researchers have only recently begun to explore how the ...individuals who pass through the carceral system also interact with welfare state programs. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, in this article, I explore how formerly incarcerated individuals make claims on the welfare state and how participation varies across social programs and states, as well as by race, drawing on theories of social welfare rights‐claiming and system avoidance. In so doing, I provide the first nationwide estimates of the extent to which previously incarcerated adults use social safety net resources. I find that participation in welfare programs varies with incarceration history, program structure, and race. Rather than finding patterns consistent with system avoidance, I find that previously incarcerated White Americans seem to engage in active rights claiming, participating in public assistance programs more than similarly eligible never‐incarcerated counterparts. All formerly incarcerated individuals, however, have limited access to more generous social insurance programs, and the shift to an increasingly employment‐based social safety net seems likely to further limit access to the welfare state for the growing population of Americans leaving prison.
Abstract
Social workers are often depicted as street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) or professionals interchangeably. However, to find out how social workers relate to new policy measures, a clear ...distinction between SLBs and professionals is helpful. Ideal–typical SLBs subscribe to new policies although they may diverge from them in practice, to accommodate clients. Ideal–typical professionals weigh new policies against their ethical code. If the new policy goes against their professional principles, they protest on behalf of their clients. In this article, we study Dutch social workers who have to implement a new policy that (i) obliges their clients to actively participate in society and (ii) obliges them to rely on family and friends when they need help. The data for this article are derived from two projects: interviews with twenty-nine experienced social workers and interviews with social workers in neighbourhood teams and observations of their interactions with clients in six municipalities. We found that Dutch social workers think as professionals: they weigh the new policy against their ethical code and have serious doubts about the second part of the new policy. Hence, they find ways to avoid implementation. However, they behave as SLBs, bending the rules in practice. They rarely confront policymakers or higher management.
Charitable responses to people experiencing poverty are often viewed as valuable community-led initiatives that address the support gaps created by a withdrawing welfare state. This perspective ...provides important insights into the culturally valorised nature of charity. The role of the mainstream media in cultivating and valorising charity, in contrast, remains relatively underexplored. Drawing on a framing analysis of Australian mainstream news reports published between 2014 and 2020, we analyse how the media frames charity as a response to people experiencing poverty. We demonstrate that the media frames people experiencing poverty as having a devalued identity, for which the remedy is the restoration of dignity through charity. Little attention is paid to the material inequalities that underpin people’s experiences of poverty; nor the role of the media as a body that reifies the interests of the powerful, who benefit from poverty and charitable responses to it.
Long before the exacerbating effects of COVID-19, household food insecurity (HFI) has been a persistent yet hidden problem in wealthy nations such as Canada, where it has been perpetuated in part ...through dominant discourses and practices. In this critique of HFI-related frameworks, we suggest that discourses organized around the production and (re)distribution of food, rather than income inequality, have misdirected household food insecurity reduction activities away from the central issue of poverty, even inadvertently enabling the ongoing neoliberal “rollback” of safety net functions. Unlike most scholarship that focuses on the politics of food systems, or health research that insufficiently politicizes poverty, this analysis emphasizes the role of politics in income discourses. In spite of their contradictions, food-provisioning- and income-based discourses are potentially complementary in their shared recognition of the right to food. Operating from the perspective of political economic theory, we conceive of the right to food as a claim not only to a resource but also to membership within political communities that envision alternatives to neoliberalism as manifested in our labour, welfare, and food systems. In this sense, the right to food offers a unifying framework that links civil society with senior governments, collective action with legal instruments, and food and income concerns. HFI reduction activities organized around the right to food may thus aim to rectify cross-cutting imbalances in political and economic power.
A growing body of research connects diversity to anti-welfare attitudes and lower levels of social welfare expenditure, yet most evidence comes from analyses of US states or comparisons of the United ...States to Europe. Comparative analyses of European nation-states, however, yield little evidence that immigration – measured at the country-level – reduces support for national welfare state programs. This is not surprising, given that research suggests that the impact of diversity occurs at smaller, sub-national geographic units. Therefore, in this article, we test the hypothesis that immigration undermines welfare attitudes by assessing the impact of immigration measured at the regional-level on individual-level support for redistribution, a comprehensive welfare state, and immigrants’ social rights. To do this, we combine data from the European Social Survey with a unique regional dataset compiled from national censuses, Eurostat, and the European Election Database (13 countries, 114 regions, and 23,213 individuals). Utilizing multilevel modeling, we find a negative relationship between regional percent foreign-born and support for redistribution as well as between regional percent foreign-born and support for a comprehensive welfare state. Objective immigration, however, does not increase opposition to immigrants’ social rights (i.e. welfare chauvinism). We discuss the implications of these results and conclude that traditional welfare state attitudes and welfare chauvinism are distinct phenomena that should not be conflated in future research.
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