The BMA (British Medical Association)–TUC (Trades Union Congress) Joint Committee on Medical Questions, established in 1936, was an experiment in consensus. It was the first attempt to cross the barriers in medical politics. In the 1930s the strategy of ‘administration rather than advocacy’ prompted the co-operation of the TUC with the BMA on medical questions of mutual interest. The operation of the partnership is explored here in the formulation of a scheme for a national maternity service acceptable to both parties. However, the reality of co-operation at the level of specific proposals was an insistence by the BMA on its own point of view. The TUC had to decide whether a joint scheme was worth the price. Although a scheme was eventually produced, as an experiment in consensus the committee had failed. To some extent the war obscured this failure, but the consensus itself was wrecked by the intransigence of the BMA and the hostility of the Labour movement, which was angry at the extent of the concessions which the TUC had made for a national maternity scheme.

This paper examines the proposition that the welfare policies enacted and legitimised in the name of ‘choice’ have the effect of increasing the effective choice of service by consumers of welfare. The example of residential care of the elderly is used to illustrate the ways in which privatisation has influenced choices of care for elderly people in Devon. The paper reviews empirical material from two surveys of private homes in Devon in order to throw light on the ‘myths’ and realities of choice in residential accommodation and in other welfare provision available to the elderly in Devon. The paper identifies as the key debate the question of priorities: whether resources should be concentrated on providing suitable residential places for the increasing number of the very disabled elderly or used to increase the alternatives for the larger, more able groups. The latter option can perhaps be reasonably achieved through market mechanisms, whilst the former is more likely to require the specialised skills of social workers and other caring professionals. Although it is possible to argue that the growth in numbers of private old people's homes represents an increase in choice for the elderly, on closer examination this appears too simple an assertion. The expansion of the private sector has not necessarily expanded the range of alternative forms of care. In particular, there seems a major flaw in current policies by which the operation of the DHSS subsidy increases the availability of residential rather than domiciliary care.

A decade on from the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, this article examines the contributions of social scientists to the Inquiry on two key issues: the meaning of institutional racism and the police response to racial violence. These academic inputs are characterised as instrumental and reflexive forms of knowledge. While social science applied to social policy is most effective in instrumental mode, rather than reflexively, there are various factors – such as the interpretation of evidence, media debate and the role of prominent individuals – that are more significant in assessing its consequences. The impact of these factors mean that, although academic work on these issues has been influential, the outcome appears to be that institutional racism has run its course and been disowned or downgraded, while racial violence has become subsumed within the broader category of hate crime. It is argued that the relationship between academic knowledge and policy requires a better grasp of the complexities of applying social science, and that is what this article aims to make a contribution to.

In 2008, compulsory community care (CCC) for people with severe mental illness was introduced in Sweden. CCC requires co-operation between psychiatric and social services, thus further complicating the longstanding difficulties with service coordination in the mental health field.

This article investigates what happens when a new policy is introduced that assumes complex co-operation of two organisations bestowed with high degrees of discretion. The process of institutionalisation will be analysed in terms of how an idea is translated and materialised on local levels. This has been investigated by interviewing key informants within psychiatric and social services at three different locations.

The implementation was perceived as relatively successful and occurred without major conflict. The main effect of the new legislation was improvement in the coordination of services, where designing a template form for a coordinated care plan was central. The inter-organisational discussions about service coordination that arose had a spill-over effect on services for other patient groups.

In essence, respondents describe CCC as a pedagogical reform to promote the coordination of services, rather than a reform to increase coercive powers over patients. This raises concerns about the legitimacy of the reform.

Informal caregiving for older family members is increasingly recognized and encouraged by public policies. This is even more the case in familialistic countries such as Austria. This article aims to examine the role of the family in the care culture of a familialistic care regime through the experiences of care dyads combining upwards intergenerational family care and formal care services. The analysis is based on framework analysis of 48 face-to-face interviews, almost all conducted separately, with 24 care dyads of older care users (average age 86 years old with moderate to high care needs) and their main informal carers in Austria combining formal and informal care. A quarter of caregivers and care receivers were male. We identified four different ideals (family care, preferences, involvement, gendered care) which were distributed across different groups of Socio-Economic Status (SES) and described by women and men.

The Irish poor law debate of the 1830s has largely been overlooked, but is a substantial source in understanding the impact of social theory concerning ‘virtue’ on social policy making in the early nineteenth century and on into the present time. The Chair of the Royal Commission for Inquiring into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (1833–36) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin, Richard Whately, a leading figure in intellectual endeavour in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although his contributions to theology, economics and education have been reassessed, his central role in poor law thought is not well understood. This article examines the key tenets of his social theory and reassesses their impact on the Irish poor law debate. Whately was an Oxford Noetic (Greek for ‘reasoners’) committed to merging the study of natural theology and political economy in order to encourage ever greater levels of virtue on individual and societal levels. He believed that individual and social lives were designed to advance through the reciprocal exchange of labour, goods and ideas in a free and open market economy. Ireland in the 1830s presented the ideal opportunity for Whately to express his theory of moral growth and social advance in terms of poor law policy, directed towards modifying circumstances to make possible the development of individual abilities while avoiding measures which would encourage vice or discourage virtue.

This article discusses the experiences of women and children who become homeless as a result of domestic violence and assesses the extent to which their need for housing, both temporary and permanent, is being met within Wales. It explores women's experiences of living in and moving on from refuges. Refuge provision in Wales is not sufficient to meet the demand for refuge spaces. However, for those women and children who are accommodated in refuges, the experience is significant in supporting them through a highly stressful period of their lives. This is related to the communal nature of refuge living and the high levels of support from refuge workers and from other women. The availability of suitable and affordable move-on accommodation for women and children leaving refuges is also insufficient to meet need. This results in long stays in refuges for women and children who have been accepted as officially homeless and are waiting to be rehoused by local authorities and may lead to their returning to violent domestic situations. It also exacerbates the shortage of refuge provision for women and children in need of temporary, crisis accommodation. Women and children who have survived domestic violence need access to housing which is safe and affordable where support is available if wished for. These needs are not being met.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the provision of early childhood education and childcare services (ECEC) is associated with higher women’s participation in the labor market. However, many questions about the causal relationship between the supply of childcare and patterns of female employment remain open. In an effort to overcome common endogeneity problems, we conducted a conjoint experiment in Switzerland, which enables us to analyze mothers’ employment intentions in different – and even in some hypothetical – contexts. Our results demonstrate that improving the provision of ECEC services does affect mothers’ intentions to engage in paid labor. Nevertheless, mothers comprise a heterogeneous group. As expected, ECEC services’ effects are limited for mothers with comparatively high levels of employment. In contrast, mothers with low levels of employment are quite reactive to changing policy contexts, especially if external childcare spots for preschoolers become affordable. Notably, elasticity is present not only in the behavior of women with preferences for supplementary, external childcare, but also in that of women with preferences for parental or home-centered childcare. Our study thus highlights childcare policies’ potential to change the patterns of female employment in contexts marked by persistent traditional gender roles and limited childcare provision.

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.

The enormous growth of state expenditure in advanced industrial societies during the thirty years after the second world war is widely acknowledged and many attempts have been made to account for the phenomenon. Most of these explanations, however, either isolate specific factors or are applicable at a very high level of generality and so make it difficult to develop a wider understanding of the growth of the modern welfare state. This article is predicated upon the assumption that one way to overcome this difficulty is to identify, and evaluate the importance of, the different factors which have stimulated the growth of specific programmes rather than aggregate expenditures. It examines the growth of state spending on national insurance pensions in the United Kingdom between 1951 and 1978, therefore, because this is the most expensive of all social programmes. The primary purpose of the article is to identify, discuss and assess the relative importance of the most important causal factors which account for the growth of spending on pensions. This analysis is based upon the decomposition of the growth into its most important constituent parts. An attempt is also made to employ multiple regression to investigate changes in the real rate of basic pension, but the conclusion reached in this particular case is that it is a poor substitute for historical case studies. Finally, some speculative thoughts are advanced about possible future trends in spending on basic state pensions.

The standard of living of older people is a critical policy matter, given Australia's ageing population. Conventional living standard assessments continue to rely on disposable income as a defining indicator, despite it not encompassing the full range of potential consumption possibilities that affect an individual's economic living standard. This article proposes a series of three economic resource metrics that sequentially append the disposable income metric with the value of non-cash benefits and services arising from the receipt of public goods and/or services from home ownership in the form of a ‘full’ income metric, and then the inclusion of wealth in the form of two derived ‘potential consumption’ metrics. Using data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, the findings demonstrate that augmenting disposable income with income streams from non-cash services and annuitised wealth substantially improves the relative economic position of older Australians. It also highlights the heterogeneity in economic living standard outcomes for different demographic sub-groups of older people that would otherwise be drawn using a disposable income analytic lens. The article argues that an expanded economic resource perspective is necessary for informing ageing and social policy.

The translation perspective explores the travel of policy ideas, programmes and practices across international boundaries, focusing on the process through which interpretative agents introduce and adjust borrowed policy items to a new policy context. Current research emphasises the significance of local networks’ support for translation's efficacy. However, we know little about how such networks are maintained and stabilized over time or how changing configurations and capacities may affect translation's prospects. This paper explores the case of Israel's attempted institutionalisation of workfare – an enduring international policy fashion – from 1998 to the present day. We follow the stabilization and destabilization of the local translation network across different levels and sites of policy design and implementation, analysing emerging conflicts and agreements at each site. We use the metaphor ‘episodes of translation’ to explore translation's value as a concept accounting for local policy change. In order for translation-led policy change to maintain legitimacy and actualisation in contested domains, ongoing engagement of existing and emerging policy actors is essential. This case demonstrates how when networks become destabilized, translation-led policy change may come to a halt.

A growing number of studies investigate the relative importance of the major deservingness criteria (control, attitude, reciprocity, identity, need) in explaining the perceived welfare deservingness of different social groups. This paper addresses the roles of those criteria in predicting the perceived deservingness of a rarely examined group, single mothers. We conducted a survey in Hungary and compare the responses to direct questions about deservingness to the results of a vignette-based survey experiment in which the deservingness criteria were translated to characteristics of hypothetical mothers. Our results show that in the absence of deservingness cues (direct questions), respondents relied on the attitude, reciprocity/control, identity (measured by traditional family values), and need criteria to the same extent. On the other hand, in the presence of specific deservingness cues (vignette experiment), people disregarded their family values and stereotypes, and the perceived need became the strongest predictor of single mothers’ deservingness. These results support the existence of the deservingness heuristic, however, compared to previous literature that emphasized the role of perceived control and reciprocity of recipients, in the case of single mothers, the deservingness heuristic seems to direct people’s attention to the perception of need.

This paper investigates which factors shape popular support for the taxation of wealth in Germany, a country with one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in Western Europe. Although public support for progressive taxation in general is strong, no tax on personal net wealth is currently levied. Against this backdrop, we ask how objective and subjective self-interest, information about wealth inequality and deservingness valuations regarding the wealthy affect popular support for a personal wealth tax. Particular attention is paid to the interaction between self-interest and deservingness. Using original survey data and a vignette design, we find that subjective self-interest is more important than objective self-interest, and that providing information on aggregate wealth inequality can shift the attitudes of those who are otherwise indifferent in favour of wealth taxation. Furthermore, deservingness valuations impact support for taxation in important ways. Factors indicating meritocratic wealth accumulation reduce support, and this is especially pronounced among low-status respondents. By contrast, while non-meritocratic factors increase support for taxation, these effects are largely off-set in privileged groups. Altogether, these findings suggest that self-interest and deservingness valuations impact attitudes towards wealth taxation in opposing directions, and that providing information to those otherwise indifferent might increase redistributive preferences.

The ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the 1960s in the United States and the rising welfare expectations all over the world have sharpened a continuing debate about the relative merits of a variety of proposals for dealing with want. A discussion of the Soviet approach may provide a useful perspective for us and for other countries. Income maintenance programmes in the Soviet Union, as they had developed up to 1968, have been studied by this author. In this paper, an attempt is made to bring developments up to date, focusing on what they suggest in regard to policy for the 1970s.