There is absolutely no way to attack poverty through the transfer of economic resources without also profoundly affecting, for better or ill, the social bond. Definitions of social welfare generally recognize ‘…the mutually supportive obligations of people to each other’. Yet many serious and competent social thinkers apparently deny the significance of reciprocity in those social exchanges that are arranged as a matter of social policy. The predominant view is that social policies are ‘…characterized not so much by exchange by which a quid is gotten for a quo as by unilateral transfers that are justified by some kind of appeal to a status or legitimacy, identity or community’. Titmuss refers to the grant or gift as a unilateral transfer which ‘…is the distinguishing mark of the social (in policy and administration) just as exchange or bilateral transfer is the mark of the economic’. It will be argued here that this view, useful in some ways, also seriously distorts perceptions and has a deleterious effect on the design and implementation of programmes that make up the official helping enterprise in general, and programmes of income maintenance in particular. Most often social policy transactions are erroneously conceived in ideal or pure terms, bearing little or no resemblance to economic or market exchange. In reality, however, the vast majority of all transactions, economic and social, occur on a continuum between these theoretical poles.

The article deals with the geographical imbalance of medical manpower in general practice; it describes corrective policies employed in the NHS, some major administrative problems stemming from those policies, and the prospects under reorganization.

First, the problem is seen within the context of inequalities in the distribution of other health and welfare services in the United Kingdom and of medical manpower in other countries. The second section summarizes the three major strategies employed since 1948: the Medical Practices Committee, the Initial Practice Allowances and the Designated Area Allowance. Problems arising from these policies include the fragmentation of responsibility, the lack of agreed objectives and the haphazard nature of the geographical units within which restrictions and incentives operate. The final section deals with the opportunity, presented by the 1973 National Health Service Reorganisation Act, to restructure these unsatisfactory features of the administrative framework. It is feared that the impetus for change is in danger of being lost, and that the establishment of the new health authorities alongside the old, largely unaltered machinery will merely add to the fragmentation of responsibility, thus exacerbating the imbalance of resources.

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 Voluntary sector

10 Government

11 Gender and sexuality

12 Demography

Participation and attendance in the arts can foster social capital, economic regeneration and skill acquisition. For these reasons, encouraging greater arts participation and attendance among disadvantaged groups became part of the New Labour strategy to promote neighbourhood renewal and tackle social exclusion. It is, however, far from clear what policies are best suited to achieve the aim of greater involvement in the arts. One policy option is to award subsidies to lower admission fees. Using 14 years of data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey, the article examines whether lower prices stimulate attendance at live performances overall and among low-income groups in particular. Findings indicate that while ticket prices influence attendance generally, the response of different income groups is similar, with a 10 per cent increase in price accompanied by a 9 per cent drop in demand. This means that, while price controls may be effective in increasing overall attendance levels among all groups in the population, including among low-income groups, they may not prove adequate whenever the main aim is to reduce the gap in participation across social groups.

The following acknowledgement was omitted from the original publication:

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the BBSRC (The Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council) for the funding of IKnowFood at York which is 4-year research programme being funded through the Global Food Security-Food System Resilience programme with contributions from BBSRC, ESRC, NERC, and the Scottish Government.

The authors apologise for this oversight.

In volume 20 part 3 (1991), the review by N. Charles of Women and Poverty: Exploring the Research and Policy Agenda (page 437) incorrectly gave its editors as Caroline Glendinning and Jane Millar. The editors are in fact Jennie Popay and Hilary Graham. We apologise for this error.

In this article, we examine how labour market policy interventions, notably short-time work (STW), affect voting behaviour in times of electoral downturn. We use the 2009 German general elections as an example. This is a particularly interesting case because the grand coalition of Christian democrats (CDU/CSU) and social democrats (SPD) was up for re-election against the backdrop of a major recession following the 2007/08 financial crisis and extensively used STW policies to counteract rising unemployment. Interestingly, STW policy and unemployment vary considerably between regions. We exploit this variance to create a unique dataset that combines regional information on STW policy and unemployment in 299 German electoral constituencies with individual data from the post-election survey. Our results show that especially the SPD profited from high STW rates at constituency level on election day, but this policy was insufficient to preclude the major losses social democrats suffered during the election. More generally, our results indicate that classic labour market policy can generate electoral support for social democratic parties, even as a “junior partner” in a grand coalition. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether such support is sufficient for electoral victories.