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This article aims to explore whether and how economic, political and demographic municipal conditions shape citizens' attitudes regarding decentralised social policies.

The authors analysed the 2018 wave of the Dutch Local Election Studies, which includes a novel survey item asking respondents whether they prefer local social policies to be primarily: (1) protection-based, (2) cohesion-building or (3) activation-based. The authors appended context indicators to that survey and performed multilevel logistic regression analyses (1,913 respondents nested in 336 municipalities).

At the individual level, these preferences are affected by gender, age, income, education and political inclination, as expected. However, preferences towards local social policies are not shaped by local economic, demographic or political conditions. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for future research.

By using unique data, including a newly developed survey item, this study is the first to explore whether and how municipal conditions shape preferences regarding local welfare. Understanding those preferences is increasingly important as many Western European countries have decentralised swathes of social policies from the national to the local level in recent decades.

Introduces a special issue on globalization and the welfare state. Asserts that economic globalization constrains national economic and social policy far more now than ever before, although the level of international trade has not increased that much compared to levels at the beginning of this century. Talks about the political consequences of economic globalization, particularly welfare state retrenchment in the advanced capitalist world. Outlines the papers included in this issue – comparing welfare system changes in Sweden, the UK and the USA; urban bias in state policy‐making in Mexico; and the developing of the Israeli welfare state. Concludes that economic globalization has a limited effect in shaping social welfare policy in advanced capitalist countries; nevertheless, recommends further research into which aspects of economic globalization shape social welfare policy.

What role do people's attitudes toward social policies play for the politics of welfare state reform? This chapter contributes to a growing scholarship on policy responsiveness in welfare state research with a longitudinal comparative case study of the Bismarckian welfare states of France and Germany. Quantitative analyses of changes in mean attitudes as well as polarization and inequalities of attitudes based on the 1996, 2006, and 2016 waves of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) Role of Government module are triangulated with a thick description of social policy changes. While recommodifying and defamilializing reforms in Germany transformed the welfare state fundamentally, there was more continuity in the French welfare state, in spite of a stronger focus on labor market activation policies. The quantitative results suggest that lower attitudinal stability toward the welfare state in Germany and lower polarization evoked a higher willingness for reform than in France, where more polarized attitudes and overall marginal changes in attitudes gave French governments less maneuverability in adopting reforms. In both countries, I find no evidence for an upper-class bias in policy responsiveness. In sum, my research supports the claim that change in public opinion toward the welfare state and diverging attitudes within societies play a role for the timing and direction of reforms.

This study aims to analyse how top-level policymakers across the political left-right spectrum in a social-democratic welfare state understand social enterprise (SE), its relation to existing welfare institutions and their intentions of policymaking towards SE.

This study conducted in-depth interviews explicitly focused on SE with policymakers at the national level in Norway. The informants collectively represented most political parties in Norway’s Parliament in 2017–2021. Data were analysed using a historical institutional perspective.

Centre-right wing policymakers predominantly consider SE as commercial enterprises not requiring specific policies. Left wing policymakers prefer that SEs operate like voluntary organizations and advocate policies preventing extraction of profit and competition with public service providers. Hence, policymakers positioned SE within an overarching political debate on the privatization of welfare services. They expressed little interest in developing policies aimed at strengthening SE opportunity structures.

Policy inaction impedes recognition of SEs as different from commercial and voluntary organizations, as well as their ability to compete for tenders. Thus, SE will likely remain a rather marginal phenomenon in Norway. Further research is needed to establish whether and how Norway’s universal welfare state inhibits social entrepreneurship on the society-wide level.

This article details how SE is understood within a social democratic welfare regime and the likely consequences thereof for SEs. It contributes with new knowledge of why policymakers may be reluctant to develop policy dedicated to further SE, across different political party affiliations. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in Norway to analyse how existing institutions and political controversies influence how policymakers at the national level approach SE.

The expansion of social welfare in advanced capitalist countries following the Second World War has been phenomenal. Concomitant to this is the mushrooming of comparative social research devoted to the analysis of welfare states. The central question in comparative policy discourse has been the search for the determinants of social welfare development. There is no consensus over the structural determinants for welfare efforts. However, the literature on comparative social policy has identified a significant number of variables which spur social policy development: industrialization, urbanization, modernization, working‐class mobilization, union strength, state and its particular structure, open economy, diffusion, military spending, and national ideology (Wilensky & Lebeaux, 1965; Wilensky, 1975; Uusitalo, 1984; Wilensky, 1985; Flora, 1987; O'Conner, 1988; Esping‐Andersen, 1990; Pierson, 1991; Wong & Daley, 1991; Janoski & Hicks, 1994).

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.

The two East Asian developmental states of Japan and South Korea share very similar familialistic male breadwinner welfare regimes. However, in the recent years, both countries have made significant social policy reforms that are gradually modulating their familialistic male breadwinner welfare regimes. Both countries have extended public support for the family and women by provisioning, regulating, and coordinating childcare, elder care, and work‐family reconciliation programs. At the same time, labour market deregulation reforms have also made employment more insecure, and created greater pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. The purpose of this paper is to compare recent social policy reforms in Japan and Korea and discuss their implications for welfare state changes and gender equality. More specifically, it asks whether this signals the end of the old developmental state paradigm and a shift to a more gender equal policy regime.

To answer this question, the paper examines recent social policy reforms in conjunction with economic and labour market policy reforms that have also been introduced since 1990.

The analysis of social and economic policy reforms in Japan and South Korea shows a combination of both progressive and instrumentalist motivations behind social care expansions in these countries. Social care reforms in both countries were responses to the evident need for more welfare and gender equality determined by the structural and ideational changes that were taking place. But they were also a remodelling of the earlier developmental state policy framework. Indeed, social care expansions were not merely timely family friendly social policies that aimed to address new social risks; they were also important complements to the employment policy reforms that were being introduced at the same time. By investing in the family, the Japanese and Korean governments sought to mobilize women's human capital, encourage higher fertility, and facilitate job creation in social welfare and care services.

This paper shows how Japanese and South Korean developmental states might be changing and remodelling themselves in the recent decades, and how new social policies are evolving in close coordination with economic and labor market policy reforms.

Purpose – Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variation in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship has examined the effects of social policy on women's and mothers' labor force engagement. This chapter evaluates whether generous social policies have a disincentive effect on single-mother employment.

Methodology/approach – Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), we conduct a cross-national, multilevel analysis of the effects of social policy generosity on single-mother employment in 17 affluent democracies.

Findings – We find high rates of single-mother employment – above 60 percent in 15 of the 17 countries and above 70 percent in 5 countries. We find little effect of social policy for employment, as our two measures of social policy are insignificant in almost all models. If there are welfare disincentives, they only appear significant for young single mothers, and this evidence is limited as well. We find contradictory evidence for the employment incentive for low-educated single mothers.

We determine that single-mother employment is largely driven by the same individual characteristics – educational attainment, age, and household composition – that drive employment in the general population, and among women and mothers.

Originality/value of chapter – To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the few cross-national, multilevel tests of the welfare disincentive thesis for single-mother employment. We provide evidence that welfare generosity does not discourage single-mother employment.