This themed section focuses on the political and social policy discourses of resurgent welfare chauvinism and identity politics in contemporary Europe. The populist radical right, in particular, has utilised these discourses to great effect, reframing social policy and social citizenship through a heady mix of arguments evoking the nation state and ethnicity, often contemporaneously. Although the explanations for the outcome of the referendum on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union, or Brexit, cannot be distilled to any single issue or cause, it is also impossible to deny the relevance of social policy to the outcome. For example, vote choice in the referendum was influenced by factors such as education levels and levels of labour market vulnerability (Hobolt, 2016), ultimately dovetailing with the well-known thesis about globalisation's ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ (Kitschelt & McGann, 1995; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2007; Kriesi et al., 2012) and the structural failures of post-industrial economies to stop growing inequality.

Over the last decades, governments in the advanced democracies have put greater pressure on the unemployed to seek and accept employment. This development has been pointed out in much prior research, yet relatively little is known about the exact changes that have been introduced. This paper fills this gap. It draws on a novel time-series cross-section dataset on the strictness of unemployment benefit conditions and sanctions in 21 democracies between 1980 and 2012, and shows in which aspects these rules have become stricter – and in which not. The paper confirms that there has been a general trend toward tighter conditions and sanctions, but adds some important qualifications: Many rules and provisions have also been adapted in response to the emergence of new social risks and there is also a noticeable trend toward more clearly defined and precise rules. Based on these findings, new causal hypotheses are suggested.

Like all other multilateral development banks, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which approved its first loan in November 2016, has adopted Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies. Treating the text as Chinese discourse and using Critical Discourse Analysis as methodological tool, this article unveils socio-political interests beyond its contents and semiotics. We identify areas where the AIIB policies are intertextual with the ones that inspired them, namely those of the World Bank and the regional multilateral development banks, but also important departures from their discursive practice, reflecting the legal culture and strategic interests of AIIB's founders. Both appropriation and colonisation of ‘classical’ ESGs by the AIIB ones lead to reflection on social wrongs associated with development, and suggest solutions for turning development safeguards into meaningful instruments.

Social investment in Europe has primarily been measured by studying expenditure data from specific categories of social policy. This article argues that we need a more nuanced way of studying the presence of social investment, and develops a tool for measuring the ideational content of social investment in policy regulations. By operationalising three key policy dimensions of social investment; time, distribution and policy coherence, varying approaches of social investment are discerned, landing in the development of three ideal types: a strict social investment, a targeted social investment and a reactive social investment. To demonstrate its application, the social investment ideal-types are applied to cases of policies for unemployed youth in different European countries. The operationalisation and ideal types presented in this article provide a structure and nuance to the understanding and measuring of social investment, aiding in the further debate on its pros, cons and presence in European social policy.

Whilst populism has a long-standing relationship with social policy, the recent emergence of radical right populism as a considerable political force across Europe and beyond compels us to think further about this relationship. The aim of this review essay is to bring together literature on populism, welfare chauvinism and social citizenship in order to highlight the role social policy plays in the rhetoric and political approach of the populist radical right. This essay reviews, how, by developing artificial distinctions between culturally homogeneous ‘people’ and corrupt ‘elite’, the populist radical right generates interpretations of social citizenship that confers social rights based on of cultural or ethnic belonging, rather than as a matter of right. By simplifying the nature of complex social policy problems, radical right populism further problematises the mainstream social policy agenda. Consequently, radical right populism will continue to present a significant challenge to progressive and inclusive social policy.

This paper analyses the implications that demographic and economic projections have on public pension spending in the European Union (EU). Using some stylised facts, we study the aging trends of the population, as well as labour force and employment projections. Indices of both demographic and economic dependence are built. All of this is used to determine the impact on public pension spending in the EU. Although we detect substantial heterogeneity of circumstances, we show that the states in which aging of the population weights more in explaining public pension expenditure growth as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) are generally the ones that make greater efforts to control this spending. Given the limited capacity of policies to increase active population or employment to offset the effects of aging, measures aimed at diminishing the generosity of the public pension system and at promoting private schemes have gained relevance.

Global social policy (GSP) takes different forms from those of national welfare states, since it depends on the activities of an array of international organisations and transnational actors. Three broad theoretical approaches have dominated the literature on national welfare state development: those focused on processes of economic development, industrialisation and urbanisation; those focused on class struggle and political mobilisation; and those focused on the effects of political institutions. This article applies each of these broad theoretical approaches to the development of GSP in order to illuminate the nature of GSP, its likely future development, and the constraints upon such development. It is concluded that the dominant forms taken by GSP will continue to be piecemeal, minimalist and essentially neoliberal for as long as an effective global political movement in favour of a more extensive GSP is absent.

In many European countries and in the US, populist right-wing parties are gaining ground. The political agenda of these parties is dominated by their reluctant or even out-right hostile position against migration and foreigners and a strong emphasis on nationalist values in combination with an anti-globalisation economic agenda. In most cases, the social agenda of the radical right parties and politicians are more ambiguous and less clearly explicated. These parties rely on working class ‘insiders’ and therefore may be expected to oppose austerity measures, but at that same time have firm opinions about deservingness and conditionality that may sometimes harm the interests of their voters. This article sets out to explore the social policy agenda of radical right parties in six different countries: the US, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and France. The article uses content analysis of speeches and party manifestos as its main method of data analysis.

Over the past two decades, most Latin American countries have developed cash transfer programmes for poor and low income families not covered by the social security system. These programmes now benefit about 127 million people throughout Latin America and in some countries they include more children than the family allowances of the social insurance system. How have these innovations changed the structure of child benefits in Latin America? This article discusses this issue by looking at the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. In these three countries, a wide-ranging programme of non-contributory cash transfers for low income families now operates alongside a pre-existing scheme of family allowances for formal sector workers. This has contributed to expand coverage of cash benefits for families and children, while at the same time keeping a segmented benefit structure. In contrast, a universal child benefit could overcome this segmentation and guarantee equal rights to all children.

Social investment has become a buzzword in recent years. The concept is not always precise or being used in the same way in all European countries. The central tenet of the social investment approach is to treat public expenditures not just as an economic burden, but also as an investment in the future. This is also a part of the development in the discourse. The social investment perspective is an example of how new ideas might influence social policy development. However, the use of the concept at the political level does not imply that it is also known by stakeholders. The article explains the dichotomy between the use of a concept on an overarching political and academic level with a practical understanding among actors without using the concept. The article concludes that social investment can be used in the field and that actors have an understanding hereof.

The populist radical right (PRR) is increasingly associated with welfare chauvinism, but the literature mainly focuses on Western and Northern European cases. Turning attention to Central Eastern Europe, this article investigates how PRR parties in Hungary frame welfare issues in five social policy areas from 2010 to 2016. This is done through a critical frame analysis applied to party manifestos and State of the Nation speeches by the Fidesz and Jobbik parties. Special care is taken to delineate the interlocking but not interchangeable concepts of nationalism and populism, as recent research asserts this distinction is often overlooked. The main findings are threefold: First, these parties articulate their positions chiefly through nationalist rather than populist framing; Second, while Hungary's PRR exhibits welfare chauvinist framing similar to Western and Northern Europe, a main difference detected was the role of the communist legacy; Third, beyond the article's original goals, the findings revealed a strong connection between nationalist framing and the role of gender, suggesting that the two are not mutually exclusive.

This paper analyses the politicisation of the Eurozone crisis in Finnish public debate, in May-November 2010. We emphasise how the mainstream parties responded to the radical right Finns Party's framing, in addition to two context factors: first, the constraints posed on domestic policymakers by EU and EMU-level decisions, and secondly, the sharp, economic downturn, encouraging a zero-sum interpretation of distributive claims. To trace actor positions, we analyse 1183 actor-issue statements coded from Finland's main newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. Our findings suggest that radical right-wing parties can benefit from the high salience of socio-economic issues, if distributive conflict can plausibly be portrayed as a in- and out-group conflict, and that the mainstream parties did not only adopt nationalistic rhetoric as a response to the radical right-wing Finns Party's framing, but were responding to a constraints such as the diminished room for maneuver in the EMU, moving them towards the Finns Party's position.

There has been quite a considerable amount of debate over the last decade about the importance of quality assessment in the field of LTC provision in Portugal, framed by the discourse on social investment. In a context of limited resources, care providers are pressured to demonstrate creation of value. Quality assessment becomes one of the paths to demonstrate worthiness. This, however, has not translated into standardised protocols of evaluation of impacts and quality in particular. The question has been asked why is that? In this article we contribute to answering this question by looking at the discourses of stakeholders on the topic of social investment and quality in LTC. Overall there is a discourse that acknowledges the importance of assessing investments and quality as a reliable proxy to measure return on investments, although there is a general difficulty in translating social investment and the quest for quality into specific examples and tools.

Internationally, the care-leaving debate began in the 1970s. The poor outcomes associated with care-leaving in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Australia prompted attention resulting in policy change in recent years, which continues to develop. The experience and outcomes for care leavers in South Africa reflects that of their contemporaries in other countries, however, contextual factors compound the problems that they face and there is little support available to them. This paper discusses some of the challenges facing care leavers and the development of the care-leaving debate, legislation and policy in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. A comparison of the care-leaving arena in South Africa and the support services available to care leavers in the different countries will be presented. The paper concludes by arguing that the absence of services for care leavers is a neglect of the state's responsibility as corporate parent, and represents an issue of social justice.

Ageing of society and long-term care (LTC) for the elderly are becoming hot topics on most European countries’ social and economic policy agendas. Increasing demand for the financing of LTC raises the necessity for a search for social policy alternatives without further increasing pressure on national budgets. The social investment approach is seen as an argument in favour of interpreting social expenditure as a ‘productive factor’ (ILO. (2005). Social protection as a productive factor. GB.294/ESP/4. Geneva, p. 2). This approach to welfare systems argues that social expenditure might be seen as investment that produces economic and social returns in time. The perception of what social investment is in relation to the LTC for the elderly is not clear either in public or academic discussion. In responding to this lacuna, this article analyses the views of LTC stakeholders in Lithuania concerning: the system and its challenges; what factors they consider as most significant to successful LTC policies and their implementation; and how the concept of social investment should be understood.