In this paper, we conduct an in-depth review of and commentary on two frameworks for international comparative work focused on education systems and skill formation – specifically, welfare regime and production regime approaches. We focus on how tertiary education is understood to function relationally within a national policy repertoire and explore the interplay between education and economic systems. Whereas the welfare regime literature illuminates why some regimes are conducive to human capital production and create more equitable educational and labour market opportunities, the production regime literature focuses on the ways that actors such as government, educational institutions, and unions optimise skill formation. These two theoretical perspectives offer both rival and complementary explanations of varying patterns in public investment, differentiation in education systems, and participation rates in tertiary education across countries. Our analytical account provides useful insights for understanding different national education policies and framing future research, including informing these perspectives with the more recent theoretical contributions of the social investment approach. In relation to changing conceptions of the knowledge economy, education, skill development, and the nature of employment, these two theoretical perspectives continue to provide useful conceptual lenses to examine the education/skill /employment nexus.

This article examines whether and to what extent legalised same-sex marriage can assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ+) people to develop family life and protect them from defamilisation and familisation risks. It focuses on the provision of and gaps in welfare for LGBTQ+ people since Taiwan’s same-sex marriage legalisation in 2019. A content analysis of online community discussions since marriage equality shows that local LGBTQ+ community discussions were filled with concerns about the lack of familial status for cross-border couples, lack of legal parental status and rights for same-sex parents, and questions about heteronormative values and kinship ties. This article reveals how heteronormative assumptions embedded in the policy system and in the wider society adversely influence LGBTQ+ people’s welfare, and identifies supplementary and alternative measures. It highlights the importance of providing universal basic services free from heteronormative biases and prioritising the well-being and rights of all citizens.

The respective delivery roles of public and private providers is a key battleground in the ongoing transformation of welfare states. But despite a burgeoning literature on public attitudes to aspects of welfare state activity, delivery has to date received scant attention. This article makes a first step in addressing this knowledge gap. Drawing on original survey data from the United Kingdom, it analyses attitudes towards the delivery of social policies and explores their relationship to other welfare attitudes. We show that views on delivery display less variation than attitudes to welfare generosity and redistribution, that public support for private sector involvement in delivery is limited to certain fields and that there is very little consistent support for outright privatisation. The article thus demonstrates that there is very little congruence between attitudes to ‘welfarism’ and attitudes to ‘statism’.

This article addresses whether responses to COVID-19 created opportunities for future policy change. We explore this matter by presenting a framework rooted in political economy and the literature on pandemics. We argue that the opportunities created by emergency responses are context-specific and that narratives, policy tools, and pro-equity state actors are variables that mediate emergency responses and future opportunities. We ground our analytical contribution on the emergency cash transfers deployed during 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak in two contrasting Central American countries, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The paper promotes further policy discussion on the opportunities for progressive change in unequal contexts.

Supportive public policies are suggested as ways to lessen gentrification’s impact for older adults. While explicit policies designed to help older adults with gentrification are rare, literature on age-friendly cities is a close proxy. We utilized three North American cases undergoing gentrification: New York City, NY, and Denver, CO, in the United States and Hamilton, in Ontario, Canada, to present existing neighbourhood-based policies as social determinants of health in housing, resource access, healthcare, transportation, and communal places. Age-friendly policy application gap examples and COVID-19’s impact were included. Using a qualitative comparative case study method, we found policies were not specifically designed to address older adults’ gentrification needs. With the call for age-friendly designations, the role of gentrification in neighbourhoods with older populations must be included. We call for gentrification-specific policies for older adults to provide greater safeguards especially when events such as COVID-19 compete for existing, over-stretched resources.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, both viral infection and the corresponding economic turmoil have wreaked havoc across the globe, highlighting the imperative function of the state as a social protection provider. The pandemic has seemingly created favourable political circumstances for rapidly expanding social protection, but its influences on public welfare attitudes remain unclear. In this study, I argue that the impact of pandemic-driven economic risk is too limited to spur strong public support for social protection. The employed empirical analyses using panel data collected in South Korea show that unemployment induced by the pandemic is conducive to higher degrees of individual support for social protection measures, but the impact is only short-lived. Further analyses show that, once individuals are re-employed and as the time spent in economic difficulties becomes more distant, personal unemployment experiences are no longer positively associated with support for social protection. Finally, pandemic-induced unemployment experiences have a lasting impact primarily on young adults. The evidence therefore suggests that significant institutional changes in the welfare state are hard to achieve by solely relying on the impact of economic risk.

A Sustainable Food System needs to be implemented through a legal framework balancing measures concerning all the aspects of sustainability (the social, economic and environmental ones), as defined by the Farm to Fork strategy.

Since environmental issues are considered a structural part of CAP regulations, a special attention shall be paid both to social and economic sustainability of agricultural and food system, as fundamental pillars for a resilient and competitive development of the primary sector.

A new “social” approach of agricultural policy takes into consideration the position of farmers (in particular, a fair revenue of their activity) and workers involved in the agricultural sector (in particular, the rights to protection and safety at work). It also involves the comprehensive rural areas, ie the social context that represents the premise to reach environmental goals of sustainability in rural territories, realised by the farmers themselves as main actors of the rural economy.

Therefore, for the future of food law, a strategic consideration of the legal framework related to people working in agriculture and agri-food sector should concern two main aspects.

On one hand, the introduction of social conditionality, establishing compliance with labour law rules, including work safety and transparency of employment conditions in agricultural labour contracts in order to receive CAP subsidies – becomes a component of the process for “safe food” through an “ethical and legal food production.”

On the other hand, it is important to consider the improvement of life conditions and services in rural areas in favour of resident citizens, the attractiveness of young farmers as well as the implementing measures for an inclusive growth.

These aspects, which make up a “social sustainability model” in the agri-food chain are strongly linked together and require a comprehensive policy regulation. This policy perspective includes a new perception of entrepreneurs and workers employed in rural areas intended for the production of food and related to the environmental protection.

Policies for recipients of basic income support for jobseekers in Germany focus on activation and quick labour market integration. Yet, the majority of benefit recipients report severe health impairments. Against this background, the article investigates implications of health impairments for benefit recipients’ jobcentre relationship and employment opportunities. The analyses show that 63 per cent of non-employed benefit recipients report health restrictions on their employment capabilities, 51 per cent report severe health impairments, and 25 per cent that they cannot work at all. The most frequent types of health impairments are musculoskeletal and mental health impairments. Health impairments significantly reduce entry rates into socially insured employment, but do not seem to inhibit taking up uninsured minijobs. Counselling frequency increases job entry rates for benefit recipients without health impairments in the short-term. For those with health impairments, no short-term effects are found over a one-year follow-up period. Policy responses could include a more explicit acknowledgement of health impairments as a central issue for benefit recipients. Greater investments in rehabilitation and subsidised employment could be part of a strategy to improve opportunities for benefit recipients with health impairments to find better-quality (part-time) employment instead of uninsured minijobs. The analyses are based on linked longitudinal PASS survey and administrative data.

Under what conditions do incumbents succeed in curtailing programs benefitting large constituencies of low-income voters? We undertake a within-country comparison of four highly popular cash transfer policies in Brazil in the 2010s. Our contribution is threefold. First, we refine the concept of policy drift by distinguishing executive-driven drift (resulting from incumbents’ decisions) from opposition-driven drift (resulting from the veto power of welfare opponents). The latter results from the dispersion of authority; the former is favored by its concentration. Second, we show that executive-driven drift is a successful strategy when programs give incumbents discretion over entitlement and benefits, meaning authority to make unilateral decisions. Third, we argue that executive-driven drift explains retrenchment outcomes better than partisan orientation, size of program’s clientele, and fiscal impacts. Incumbents were more successful in their retrenchment initiatives when concentration of authority in the executive branch allowed them to bypass legislative and judicial veto points.

Social problems are becoming increasingly complex. Policymakers, thus, cannot solve these issues with a single policy instrument. For example, while decades of research have examined the individual factors that influence financial stress, less is known about how organisations, social structures, policies, social norms, and large-scale events interact to affect one’s financial wellbeing. Using a systems approach as the basis of our conceptualisation, we put forward a theoretical model to help policymakers and practitioners to address the root causes of such complex issues. We argue that extant literature does not adequately conceptualise the complex relationships between the micro, meso, and macro-level drivers of financial wellbeing. As a result, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are under-resourced when it comes to designing interventions to improve individuals’ financial situations. We use the examples of affordable housing and social security policy to highlight the utility of a systems approach. In doing so we contribute to ongoing debates by putting forward a model of financial wellbeing in the context of Western countries (specifically Australia) that can better incorporate the moderating, mediating, and reciprocal relationships between financial wellbeing and its drivers.

This introduction to our themed section on social policy responses to the recent cost-of-living crisis spells out this topic and the key issues examined in the section’s main contributions before summarising their findings and overall contribution to the literature. More specifically, to frame this themed section, the present Introduction begins with a concise, up-to-date overview of the inflationary crisis that emerged in late 2021 and evolved throughout 2022 and the first half of 2023. It then charts, and reflects upon, the diversity of responses enacted in a variety of countries reflective of different models of welfare provision in Europe and North America.

As they were just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southern European nations were confronted with a new shock to their economies – this time in the form of a steep rise in prices. This article describes and typifies the social policy responses and measures adopted in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain in response to rising inflation. We find that Southern European (SE) governments have put forward a substantive fiscal response – which compares well with that of its neighbours, and even with the previous crisis. The thrust of the response was targeted at limiting the pass-through of international energy prices to consumers. This was complemented, albeit to a lesser degree, with direct support to families. Nevertheless, we do find important differences concerning the weight given to (traditional) welfare transfers, and the role given to indexation mechanisms and wage increases. We also find important continuities with the model of crisis-response adopted during the pandemic.

Policy responses to the inflation crisis in Belgium and the Netherlands show great similarities but also significant differences. In both countries responses were quick and substantial. Measures covered prices more than household incomes while universal, not earmarked measures exceeded selective interventions. However, there were also major differences between the two countries. Because Belgium, unlike the Netherlands, could fall back on the mechanism of automatic indexation of wages and social benefits; it relied more on existing universal policy instruments while in the Netherlands more targeted ad hoc measures were taken which also allowed for innovation in policy making. These different policy paths have their origins in the 1980s when policy models began to diverge and different legacies emerged.

This article traces the history of the Office of Economic Opportunity/Community Services Administration, focusing on Richard Nixon’s failed attempt to dismantle it in 1973 and Ronald Reagan’s successful effort in 1981. I explore main two main questions: Why was Reagan able to succeed when Nixon had failed? and What does the dismantling of the agency reveal about the development of American conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s? Drawing on original archival materials, I argue that the Reagan administration learned from Nixon’s failures and adopted a more professional, managerial stance when it dismantled the agency in 1981. In addition, recent work in history and political science has explored how the multiracial democratic vision articulated by LBJ’s Great Society helped fuel the modern conservative movement. By focusing on the long-term opposition against OEO/CSA, this article provides new insights into how conservatives articulated an alternative ideology to postwar liberalism.