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.

There has been an increasing interest in exploring the different types of welfare regimes in middle- and low-income countries. However, most of the studies so far seem to neglect the importance of illicit groups as welfare providers. Illicit groups can be so powerful in many of these societies, that they can create extensive social safety nets embedded in parallel governance orders. Considering their importance as fundamental actors in the Global South, it is required to acknowledge their role as welfare deliverers as a missing piece in the literature. Hence I discuss the nature of what I call “clandestine welfare” and three specific forms of social protection provided by illicit groups: direct, involuntary, and forced. In the first form, the illicit groups provide directly to society by delivering goods or services that the formal state fails to provide. In the second, the illicit group’s activities have involuntary but positive spill-overs over society in terms of welfare. In the last one, the illicit groups use violence to force other social actors to provide social protection. By bringing illustrative examples from Latin America, I aim to show that the action of illicit groups represents a tangible source of welfare for a large segment of the population that goes beyond charity.

This study examines which poverty attributions are present in Guyana, a developing country in South America, and tests which variables explain these attributions in a non-Western context by linking them to structural characteristics, feelings of resentment, and values. First, using survey data from the Values and Poverty Study in Guyana (N = 1,557), we find that the traditional three-tier model does not adequately capture Guyanese attributions of poverty. Instead, confirmatory factor analysis identifies some subdimensions of structural attributions that refer to both social and economic structure, a hybrid dimension linking poverty to family breakup, and explanations related to social and individual fate. Second, we examine the impact of feelings of resentment on poverty attributions. In particular, experiences of powerlessness foster structural, fatalistic, and family attributions of poverty, illustrating the role of a lack of external locus of control. Finally, our study shows that ideological values and egalitarianism have the strongest predictive power.

It has become universal to claim a relationship between social cohesion and quality public childcare. The more we invest in our children, the better the return later in life. We explore how childcare is used to strengthen social life by comparing the state role in civilising childcare as described in policy and educational guidelines. At one level, we find that policy intentions are framed by the idea of using childcare to reduce inequalities between people and social groups, and at another by the idea of civilising children to adapt to existing social structures. The analysis unfolds these two sets of intentions by showing how pedagogical ideas of child development become linked to the ways two very different states – Brazil and Denmark – formulate and organise ECEC policies as well as using childcare to bridge between people and social groups, and to civilising children to adapt to existing social structures.

Charities are long-established and increasingly prominent non-state actors in social policy. However, these organisations remain understudied within social policy research, particularly their presence in the delivery of global social policy. This paper provides new cross-national evidence about charities operating internationally. It makes use of a comprehensive administrative dataset covering the country of operation of every overseas charity registered in England and Wales, Australia, and Canada. The international connections of charities are extensive, and these organisations are much more likely to work in countries with shared colonial and linguistic ties, and less likely to work in those with poor governance or high levels of corruption. This paper goes beyond a binary focus on either “developing” or “developed” country contexts, and provides insight into the international connections of “non-elite” as well as “elite” social policy actors.

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.