Britain’s Household Benefit Cap restricts the amount of benefit income unemployed households can receive. In this article, it is examined using material held at the UK’s National Archives recording debates about a proposal to introduce a similar policy – a benefit limit – in the first Thatcher Conservative government elected in 1979. It was rejected, but the Household Benefit Cap was introduced three decades later. The article locates debates about, and the practice of restricting benefit income, in perennial social security concerns with the financial incentive to do waged work. The article argues that while there are material differences that help explain the different policy outcomes in 1980 and 2010, they can primarily be explained by changing ideas about the roles of social security policy, including the development of the ‘incentive paradigm’ concerned with manipulating behaviour; a loss of concern with the hardship that would come with the introduction of a benefit restriction and a view that institutions other than the state are better placed to address poverty and buttress work incentives.

Universal Credit is the UK’s globally innovative social security reform that replaces six means tested benefits with one monthly payment for working age claimants - combining social security and tax credit systems. Universal Credit expands welfare conditionality via mandatory job search conditions to enhance ‘progression’ amongst working claimants by requiring extra working hours or multiple jobs. This exposes low paid workers to tough benefit sanctions for non-compliance, which could remove essential income indefinitely or for fixed periods of up to three years. Our unique contribution is to establish how this new regime is experienced at micro level by in-work claimants over time. We present findings from Qualitative Longitudinal Research (141 interviews with 58 claimants, 2014-17), to demonstrate how UC impacts on in-work recipients and how conditionality produces a new coerced worker-claimant model of social support. We identify a series of welfare conditionality mismatches and conclude that conditionality for in-work claimants is largely counterproductive. This implies a redesign of the UK system and serves as an international warning to potential policy emulators.

This article describes and explains labour market reforms in Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2011 to 2014. Policy outputs were not homogenous, but differentiated between a first phase where recalibration co-existed alongside hard liberalising measures and a second phase, from late 2012, where recalibration was dropped and liberalisation further deregulated employment protection and security and eroded collective bargaining. This variation is explained by the changing coalitional politics and blame allocation underpinning policymaking under conditionality. Initial reforms resulted from a broad informal political coalition spanning the governing centre-right parties, the main opposition party, a trade union and employer confederations; its breakdown in late 2012 led to the executive’s increasing centralisation, the shut down of social concertation, and more radical policy outputs. The article shows that cooperation between government and opposition and government and social partners is possible even under external conditionality, how coalition politics affects the nature and direction of reforms, and highlights how political dynamics of blame allocation drive the process of coalition building and breakdown.

Welfare conditionality, and the underlying understanding of unemployment because of lack of motivation, has been widely criticized. This article analyses if and how more co-created services can be a pathway to address some of these challenges. As Denmark currently is moving towards a softening of welfare conditionality for the vulnerable unemployed, and local authorities try to develop models ‘in between’ welfare conditionality and genuine user involvement, this constitute a good case for analysing this question. The analysis build on comprehensive ethnographic data from a four-year research- and innovation project in six Danish municipalities. The employment services in the project have tried to design new strategies involving clients in the development and implementation of services. Among other things, this includes developing integrated services, qualifying the meeting and the talk between front-line workers and clients, engaging the employer side and NGO’s outside the public services and promoting other measures to ensure real involvement of the citizens in the processes. The analysis lists some of the potentials and pitfalls in these innovative processes and reflects upon the feasibility of such new type of co-created services.

Despite the importance of public transport for urban vitality, social equity, and mobility, the discussions surrounding these topics have become heated ideological battles between liberals and conservatives in the United States, as in other countries. Conservatives, in particular, have exhibited anti-transit attitudes that have worked against the development of public transport.

Scholars note that political trust functions as a heuristic and its impact is felt more strongly among individuals who face ideological risks with respect to a given public policy. Based on several studies noting the relationships between political trust, ideology and policy attitudes, the study employs the pooled data of the 2010 and 2014 General Social Surveys. It finds that conservatives are negatively associated with supporting spending on public transport, but when contingent upon high levels of political trust, they become more supportive of it. The study discusses the potential of political trust as a mechanism to influence public policy discourses as well as certain methodological and substantive limitations.

This paper uses the principles of trauma-informed care – safety, collaboration, choice, trustworthiness, and respect – to reflect on the quality of veterans’ treatment within the UK social security system. Drawing upon new data from qualitative longitudinal research with veterans in four geographical locations across England, UK, it explores their experiences within the social security system, highlighting specific issues relating to their interactions with the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) but also the conditionality inherent within the UK benefits system. Overall, it is evident that there is a lack of understanding of the impact of trauma on people’s psychosocial functioning and, as a result, veterans are treated in ways which are variously perceived as disrespectful, unfair or disempowering and in some cases exacerbate existing mental health problems. We propose that the application of trauma-informed care principles to the UK social security system could improve interactions within this system and avoid re-traumatising those experiencing on-going or unresolved trauma. The paradigm of trauma-informed care has been used internationally to examine health, homelessness, prison and childcare services, but ours is the first exploration of its application to the delivery of social security.

The concept of autonomy is essential in the practice and study of gerontology and in long-term care policies. For older adults with expanding care needs, scores from tightly specified assessment instruments, which aim to measure the autonomy of service users, usually determine access to social services. These instruments emphasise functional independence in the performance of activities of daily living. In an effort to broaden the understanding of autonomy into needs assessment practice, the province of Québec (Canada) added social and relational elements into the assessment tool. In the wake of these changes, this article studies the interaction between the use of assessment instruments and the extent to which they alter how older adults define their autonomy as service users. This matters since the conceptualisation of autonomy shapes the formulation of long-term care policy problems, influencing both the demand and supply of services and the types of services that ought to be prioritised by governments. Relying on focus groups, this study shows that the functional autonomy frame dominates problem definitions, while social/relational framings are marginal. This reflects the more authoritative weight of functional autonomy within the assessment tool and contributes to the biomedicalisation of aging.

The Disability Support Pension (DSP) is the major Australian government financial benefit program for people of working age with medical conditions and disabilities that restrict work capacity. Between 2012 and 2018 a series of policy reforms sought to restrict the growth in DSP payments and encourage more people with some work capacity to seek employment. We characterise changes in three markers of access to disability financial support over the reform period (1) DSP recipient rates (2) DSP grant (approval) rates and (3) the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in people with impaired work capacity. Results demonstrate a significant reduction in DSP receipt and grant rates, and significant increase in the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in working-age Australians with work disabling medical conditions and disability. These changes were not distributed uniformly. People whose primary medical condition was a musculoskeletal or circulatory system disorder demonstrated greater declines in DSP receipt and grant rates, while there was a more rapid increase in unemployment benefit receipt among people with primary mental health conditions. Some trend changes occur in periods during which new disability assessment and pension eligibility policies were introduced, though our ability to attribute changes to specific policy changes is limited.

Employees of the public employment services (PES) are street-level bureaucrats who shape activation policy on the ground. This paper examines how PES staff use enhanced discretion in an innovation project carried out by the German Federal Employment Agency. Applying a bottom-up perspective, we reconstruct PES employees’ logic of action and the dilemmas they face in improving counselling and placement services. According to our findings, placement staff use enhanced discretion to promote more individualised support and an adequate matching of jobseekers and employers. The use of discretion is framed by organisational norms and reward mechanisms and by the current labour market situation. Our analyses are based on qualitative interviews and group discussions with placement staff.

Although often neglected, the availability of employment opportunities is central to the effectiveness of active labour market policies. Employers play a crucial role in this policy field as they are both clients and co-producers of public employment services (PES). This study focuses on that relationship and reports qualitative research conducted in Tuscany (central Italy) from a street-level perspective. The findings show how public job-brokers manage this asymmetrical relationship and develop specific strategies to obtain employers’ cooperation and accomplish the PES mandate. The strategies identified here involve language adaptation, curricula “creaming”, and control of the bureaucratic procedure. These are shaped through a variable mix of four components that will be defined as relational, perceptive, technical, and tactical. This study contributes to the debate on activation policies, analysing in detail how PES frontline workers interact with employers, dealing with market logic in the public encounter.

This paper examines paternalism as a justification for welfare reforms making benefits conditional on participation in activation programs. We clarify different types of what we denote ‘throffer paternalism’ – a paternalism conjoining an offer with a threat – and ask whether there is a good case for any of them. We argue that hard but non-perfectionistic paternalism provides the most promising defense for mandatory activation but conclude that it does not give a convincing justification for this type of welfare policy.