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The present article deals with the topic of migrants’ exclusion from welfare benefits in European host countries from the angle of the research on the so-called “welfare chauvinism” (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, p. 212). More specifically, it explores the political justifications behind welfare chauvinism in the policy debate surrounding some recent chauvinist-oriented social policies. Drawing on that, the article develops a theoretical argument to generate expectations about how politicians use different types of justifications. The fundamental proposition is that the chauvinistic arguments used are shaped by the different types of social programs, i.e. either universal or means-tested programs.

Qualitative content analysis of several selected parliamentary debates in the period 2017–2019 in Austria is carried out. In order to improve the efficiency of the research, the author relies on MAXQDA, an advanced piece of software for qualitative data analysis, to code the qualitative data and analyze them. The author prefers this to other similar programs as it is considered a valid and reliable tool within the academic research world.

The article points out that programs design works as an explanatory factor to highlight variations of welfare chauvinist arguments.

It develops for the first time a theoretical argument explaining the presence and variation of welfare chauvinist arguments based on social programs design.

A growing body of work suggests that welfare and punishment should be understood as alternative, yet interconnected ways of governing poor and marginalized populations. While there is considerable evidence of a punitive turn in welfare and penal institutions over the past half century, recent studies show that welfare and carceral institutions increasingly comanage millions of people caught at the intersection of the welfare and penal sectors. The growth of “mass supervision” and the expansion of the social services sector help explain the blurring of welfare and punishment in the United States in daily practice. We suggest that these developments complicate the idea of an institutional trade-off and contend that welfare and punishment are best understood along a continuum of state management in which poor and socially marginalized populations are subjected to varying degrees of support, surveillance, and sanction. In presenting the punishment–welfare continuum, we pay particular attention to the “murky middle” between the two spheres: an interinstitutional space that has emerged in the context of mass supervision and a social services–centric safety net. We show that people caught in the “murky middle” receive some social supports and services, but also face pervasive surveillance and control and must adapt to the tangle of obligations and requirements in ways that both extend punishment and limit their ability to successfully participate in mainstream institutions.

According to convergence theory, over time societies form similar social structures, political processes and public policies. In 2001, Israel adopted a welfare reform plan that rejected the traditional strategy of passive income support and instead endorsed the concept of activation. The plan was modeled on the Wisconsin Welfare to Work program and was designed to put the long-term unemployed to work. The program began operating in four regions in 2004 but was abruptly terminated six years later. The purpose of this paper is to analyze why Israel’s welfare reform failed to follow the smooth path predicted by convergence theory and elucidates the factors in the Israeli environment that made the implementation of a program borrowed from the USA unsustainable.

A multi-method approach including interviews with key informants, content analysis of media materials and government documents and a quantitative comparative values analysis of four nations.

The failure of US-style welfare reform in Israel was due to four main factors: a more diverse recipient population, a lack of understanding of Israeli cultural values, a welfare population that included a substantial number of ethnic minorities whose customs conflicted with program regulations and a social movement against the program by non-profit organizations.

This paper demonstrates the limitations of convergence theory and highlights the salience of cultural values in the transmission of activation policies across nations. Specifically, it shows that outcomes vary when policies that are superficially similar are implanted in nations with fundamentally different cultures.

Previous literature shows that activation requirements for welfare recipients reduce welfare participation. However, the effect of mandatory activation on welfare entry and exit rates has not been fully examined. In this article, we use a rich set of register data that covers the entire population of Stockholm to study how the introduction of activation programs aimed at unemployed welfare recipients in various city districts affects the probability of individuals entering and exiting social assistance (SA). Our results show that mandatory activation has no overall average effects on SA entry or SA exit. However, we do find a significant negative effect of mandatory activation on the SA entry rate for young individuals and for unmarried individuals without children. For unmarried individuals without children, we find a positive but statistically insignificant effect on the probability to leave SA. Thus, individuals with fewer family responsibilities seem to be more responsive to the reform.

The purpose of this paper is to summarize existing evidence on welfare dependence among immigrants in Denmark and to produce new evidence with focus on the most recent years.

The paper combines a broad descriptive/analytical approach with multivariate estimation on the impact on welfare dependence from individual background factors.

The main finding is the importance of aggregate low unemployment for immigrants to assimilate out of welfare dependence. Fairly small effects are reported from policy changes intending to influence the economic incentives between welfare programs and jobs.

While panel data as used in the paper have a great potential, still a number of policy changes are not identified at the individual level. In further work it would be relevant to broaden the coverage including also some small policy programs and to extend the analysis to cover the period including the financial crisis years.

The paper has a potential to influence public attitudes in this area and to inform further public policy regarding benefit programs.

The main new result is the finding, at a disaggregate level, of how changes in immigration policy and cyclical changes interact, influencing the assimilation into or out of dependence on cash benefit programs.

Examines the Kansas job opportunities and basic skills programme to analyse why education and training programmes fail to reduce poverty and promote self‐reliance for programme participants. Uses profit model analysis to examine the effect of the Kansas job opportunities and basic skills programme on job readiness and employment. Examines client accountability to evaluate compliance with programme directives. Concludes that welfare recipient participation rates in KanWork education and training hold the key to understanding why Kansas welfare programmes contribute little to clients gaining marketable job skills.

This chapter explores the types and quality of jobs welfare recipients train for and mechanisms by which occupational gender segregation among low-wage workers persists. We report results from in-depth interviews with sixty-seven welfare case managers, employment service vocational counselors, job training administrators, and job training instructors in seven cities nationwide and short telephone interviews with one hundred and sixty-three students drawn from community colleges and other job training organizations where staff participated in the study. We look at gender-segregated patterns of referral to and enrollment in job training programs, female job training students’ interest in non-traditional training, and factors related to interest in non-traditional training. The results indicate that, while a minority of women in the sample are interested in any single non-traditional blue-collar job, a majority expressed interest in at least one non-traditional job, and 35% expressed interest in at least three non-traditional jobs. While women’s interest in non-traditional jobs seems limited, it is greater than that suggested by caseworkers’ perceptions and the pattern of caseworker recommendations and implies that reforms are needed in the welfare system to better tap women’s interest in non-traditional jobs and increase their enrollment in non-traditional training programs. Training is embedded in a larger system of gender-segregated labor markets that relegates women disproportionately to low-paying service and retail jobs. Improving opportunities for self-sufficiency for low-income women requires questioning and breaking down traditional gender norms that make women secondary economic actors.

With the events leading up to the election of the Harris Conservative government in Canada's province of Ontario in June of 1995, the debate over “workfare vs. welfare” began to heat up. Ontario traditionally has been Canada's wealthiest province and has developed generous social programmes for her own citizens. As well, over the years, the nation has counted on Ontario's wealth to provide considerable funding for the transfer payments which have supported Canada's poorer provinces. However, in recent years, Ontario has been experiencing a serious economic recession. The effects have been to dramatically increase the provincial government's debt load and to place a burden of taxation on businesses and consumers to pay the interest on this debt, while sustaining the costly social safety net. Many citizens of Ontario have come to regard this debt load as a major obstacle to economic recovery and have targeted social programmes as the focus for serious budget cuts.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a broad overview of welfare schemes in India and their impact on social protection during a period of high economic growth. It summarizes India's performance with respect to select economic and social indicators relative to select low and middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific region. It further overviews trends in some key select economic and social indicators for India and discusses India's attainment in Social Protection relative to an index of such protection provided by the Asian Development Bank.

This paper uses a comparative statistical approach and evaluates India's performance in key social welfare areas vis-à-vis that of countries with economic performance comparable to that of India. It also evaluates India's progress along these parameters over time.

The basic messages of this paper are: first, compared to low and middle-income countries in the Asia Pacific India's economic performance has outstripped its performance in social and welfare indicators. Second, nevertheless India is spending less on social welfare programs and other welfare schemes than many countries in the Asia Pacific, including some of those whose economic performance has been less impressive than India's. Third, the efficiency and effectiveness of key welfare programs in India need to be substantially improved. Particular attention needs to be paid to female participation in and their access to social welfare programs.

Informed analyses of social sector spending in India and their impact on welfare outcomes are relatively scarce although descriptive studies of social sector spending and welfare schemes abound. This paper attempts to fill this gap with a cross-country as well as intertemporal analysis of India's performance in these key areas.

The causal relationship between the size of welfare benefits and the birth decisions of women on welfare has been explored in a number of studies using a variety of analytical approaches applied to vital statistics data, data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, or similar survey data. These studies typically use non-experimental methods to relate differences in birth rates or birth decisions across states to differences in welfare benefits levels. Analyses of this type have been criticized on several grounds. Benefits across states may be correlated with unobserved interstate differences that may also be related to birth decisions. Very often, these studies measure the key independent variable, welfare benefits level, as the cash benefit guarantee under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program for a household of fixed size, varying this amount by state of residence. Actual benefits paid will vary with household size, number of AFDC-eligible household members, other sources of income, and other factors.