Veteran Care in the United Kingdom and the Sustainability of the ‘Military Covenant’

This article assesses how veteran care can be placed at the centre of our understanding of the modern Military Covenant and located as a key issue in contemporary civil–military relations and public policy. Healthcare and welfare provision have become primary manifestations of how the British state fulfils its duty of care towards military personnel. The article aims to present an overview of current provision for veterans of Britain's modern wars and draw conclusions regarding the state's ability to provide short and long‐term healthcare and welfare requirements to veterans as part of the Covenant under the rubric of ‘Big Society’‐inspired policy shifts engendered by the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government.     

Party Platforms and Public Childcare: Structural and Ideational Factors Shaping Policy in Norway and Sweden

While the Scandinavian countries are well‐known for their gender‐egalitarian policies, there are important intra‐Scandinavian policy differences. Through a comparative‐historical analysis of Norway and Sweden, this article illustrates how structural factors (economic and political) and ideational factors (gender and religion) interact and combine to produce the particular national policy outcomes in the post‐ Second World War period, using public childcare as a comparative case study. The economic developments pursued by the countries in the postwar period are key to understanding the political party dynamics, the perpetuation (or lack thereof) of religious and centre‐periphery cleavages, as well as the change in the political leadership's gender‐ideological orientations, and the consequences of these factors for the evolution of public childcare policy. Norway has no institutionalised childcare guarantee, private ownership of childcare is high and religion plays a role in the national preschool curriculum. In contrast, Sweden has a binding national childcare guarantee, public ownership remains high and religion plays no role in the preschool curriculum. The policy differences are theoretically interesting as factors commonly hypothesised as important to gender‐egalitarian policy outcome – on their own, or combined – cannot explain these differences. Thus, this article contributes important knowledge about the causal mechanisms behind gender‐egalitarian policy development. The study fills a gap in the comparative welfare state literature by showing how structural and ideational factors are mutually reinforcing.     

Long‐term care reform and the role of housing finance

Abstract

The Clinton administration's recently announced home and community‐based care proposals have potentially important implications not only for long‐term care policy, but also for housing policy in the United States. This article attempts to draw out some of those implications. The first section examines problems inherent in the current “medical/welfare” system of financing long‐term care, which constrains consumer choice by limiting the supply of providers to control costs and by increasing medical professionals’ control over the types of services provided in the name of quality control. The medical/welfare dominance of long‐term care policy has resulted in an overreliance on nursing homes as providers, resulting in both escalating costs and continued consumer dissatisfaction.

The second half of the article looks at recent market and policy developments in response to consumer demand for lower cost alternatives to nursing homes. These alternatives promote more consumer autonomy and control in supportive housing arrangements. A more comprehensive services and housing policy could promote these developments in an approach that combines the security of public financing of supportive services with the benefits of consumer choice, market competition, and legal protections that characterize housing markets. In such a scenario, housing finance institutions—including government agencies, lenders, developers, and investors—could play a pivotal role in the long‐term care debate not only by unlocking substantial financial resources but, equally important, by transforming the provision of long‐term care services to promote consumer choice and autonomy.     

Still a poster child for social investment? Changing regulatory dynamics of early childhood education and care in Denmark and Sweden

This paper investigates the regulation of publicly organized early childhood education and care (ECEC) in Denmark and Sweden, through the regulatory welfare state (RWS) framework. The analysis focuses on how alterations in funding and quality of care are shaped by governmental and nongovernmental actors at national and local levels of government. Through focused structured analysis, we examine how various actors have shaped the funding and quality of childcare in Denmark and Sweden, from the early 2000s to 2020, with special attention to the period during and after the 2008 financial crisis. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, concerns about quality in care were raised on the political agenda by various actors in both countries, leading to decisions to improve the quality of care. Yet, the regulatory dynamics differ: In Denmark, the debate led to a decision in 2019, to implement a minimum statutory requirement of regulatory quality standards. From an RWS perspective, this outcome can be qualified as “double expansion,” because regulatory quality standards, and public funding for childcare increased. In Sweden, the debates about quality of ECEC led, in 2016, to political guidelines about quality standard, but with no additional national funds, and no mandatory regulatory quality requirements. Analytically, this can be qualified as “regulatory-led expansion,” that is requirements for quality standards, although the lack of additional national funds suggests that it will be difficult to improve ECEC quality substantially. The RWS perspective, which focuses on national and municipal levels of governance, also gives insights into hidden inequalities between municipalities regarding funding and quality of ECEC, which are more pronounced in Sweden than in Denmark.     

Changes in the welfare caseload and the health of low-educated mothers.

Declines in the welfare caseload in the late 1990s brought significant change to the lives of many low-educated, single mothers. Many single mothers left welfare and entered the labor market and others found different ways to avoid going on public assistance. These changes may have affected the health and health behaviors of these women. To date, there has been little study of this issue. In this paper, we obtained estimates of the association between changes in the welfare caseload caused by welfare policy, and four health behaviors--smoking, drinking, diet, and exercise--and four self-reported measures of health--weight, days in poor mental health, days in poor physical health, and general health status. The results of our study reveal that recent declines in the welfare caseload were associated with less binge drinking, but otherwise welfare reform had little effect on health and health behaviors.     

Children,COVID, and confusion: How frontline workers cope with the challenges of vaccine mandates

With the emergence of COVID-19, many governments around the world co-oped non-health actors into enforcing comprehensive mandatory vaccination policies. Implementing these policies can be challenging, creating irreconcilable goals and problems with knowledge and understanding of areas outside the implementers’ direct field of expertise or scope of work. We know very little about how such frontline workers cope with these challenges associated with implementing policies whose goals lie well outside their remit (which we describe as generating exogenous policy pressures), and what this means for the operation of the policies. This article uses policies in place prior to the pandemic to fill this gap. It examines attitudes and experiences of frontline childcare educators who implement Australia's No Jab, No Play childhood vaccine mandate policies within the states of New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria. Through qualitative analysis of interview and focus group data, we find that these frontline workers cope with moral conflict, confusion, and a lack of knowledge by moving against clients: they rigidly follow the rules beyond legislative requirements, and sometimes break them, generating a new coping category we call ‘rigid rule breaking’. However, their need to employ coping strategies is informed by the extent to which government has designed the policy to coerce the behaviour of the providers, families, or both. The implementation of more coercive variants of No Jab, No Play policies deviates more from what legislators intended, while providers given scope to make their own decisions about enrolling unvaccinated children report satisfaction in their decision-making.

Points for practitioners

• Australian state mandatory vaccination policies generally require childcare providers to exclude unvaccinated children.
• Street level bureaucrats face pressures when implementing coercive policies exogenous to their remit.
• They may simplify policy implementation in ways that counter governments’ goals.
• Actors given more discretion about passing on coercion to policy targets demonstrate better understanding and ownership of policies.

     

Age‐based self‐interest,intergenerational solidarity and the welfare state: A comparative analysis of older people's attitudes towards public childcare in 12 OECD countries

When faced with the necessity of reforming welfare states in ageing societies, politicians tend to demand more solidarity between generations because they assume that reforms require sacrifices from older people. Political economy models, however, do not investigate such a mechanism of intergenerational solidarity, suggesting that only age‐based self‐interest motivates welfare preferences. Against this backdrop, this article asks: Does the experience of intergenerational solidarity within the family matter for older people's attitudes towards public childcare – a policy area of no personal interest to them? The statistical analysis of a sample with individuals aged 55+ from twelve OECD countries indicates that: intergenerational solidarity matters; its effect on policy preferences is context‐dependent; and influential contexts must – according to the evidence from twelve countries – be sought in all societal spheres, including the political (family spending by the state), the economic (female labour market integration) and the cultural (public opinion towards working mothers). Overall, the findings imply that policy makers need to deal with a far more complex picture of preference formation toward the welfare state than popular stereotypes of ‘greedy geezers’ suggest.     

WELFARE IDEOLOGY, THE MARKET AND SOCIAL SECURITY: Towards a Typology of Market-Oriented Reform

The global shift towards the market in the provision of social security is typically associated with the values of the New Right, but we take issue with this view. An examination of the main welfare ideologies that have influenced the development of contemporary social security systems suggests that the market and individualism have a role to play in a range of approaches to reform. Whilst some approaches unreservedly endorse the market – in a way which accords with the ideas of the New Right – other approaches adopt a pragmatic orientation based on a recognition of two public policy dilemmas, “market failure” and “state failure.” This attempt to define a middle way typifies many of the recent social security reform initiatives. Drawing upon Esping‐Andersen's recent work on de‐commodification, we construct a typology of normative approaches to the provision of social security which may be used to contextualise market‐oriented social security reform initiatives. This we argue is necessary to avoid the over‐simplified dichotomy between individualism and collectivism which is typical of so much recent work on social security reform.     

The privatisation of welfare: The impact of parties on the private/public mix in pension provision

The Conservative governments of 1979–95 have encouraged private sector pension provision to the extent that it covers two‐thirds of the British workforce. It is now possible to consider moving from the universal system of state provision laid down in the Beveridge scheme to a targeted system. Indeed, it has been suggested that the basic state pension should be abolished. However, if we consider the policy initiatives of the 1980s it would not seem that Conservative policy differs markedly from the policies pursued by the Conservative Party in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, there are also some similarities with the Labour Party policy. In this sense the case of pensions would appear to support the view that Thatcherism was less radical than has been generally claimed and represents a continuation of past policy. However, if we employ models of welfare state development to analyse policy outcomes we can demonstrate how the cumulative effect of individual policies pursued by the Conservatives has led to a change in the character of the British welfare state and thus the continuities with past policy may be deceptive.     

Politics of childcare policy beyond the left–right scale: Post‐industrialisation,transformation of party systems and welfare state restructuring

Childcare policy has become an integral part of social and economic policy in post‐industrial democracies. This article explores how the transformation of party systems structures the politics of childcare policy. It reveals that political parties contend with each other over childcare and female employment policy on the social‐value dimension as well as the redistributive dimension. Assuming that different party policies have distinct impacts on public childcare policy, it is hypothesised in this article that a government's policy position – composed of the governing parties' policy positions – affects changes in public spending for childcare services. Through an analysis of the pooled time‐series and cross‐section data of 18 advanced industrialised countries from 1980 until 2005 using multivariate regression methods, it is revealed that a government's redistributive left–right policy position interacts with its social liberal–conservative policy position, and that a left–liberal government raises its budget for childcare services while a left–conservative government does not.     

The Color of Devolution: Race, Federalism, and the Politics of Social Control

In this article, we seek to advance scholarship on the origins and consequences of policy devolution by analyzing state decisions to give local authorities control over welfare policy. The first part of our analysis explores the political forces that systematically influence state decisions to cede policy control to lower-level jurisdictions. In this context, we propose a general Racial Classification Model of how race influences social policy choice. Our findings support this model as well as social control perspectives on welfare provision. Building on these results, we then show how modest but consistent racial effects on policy choices concatenate to produce large disparities in the overall policy regimes that racial groups encounter in the federal system. The empirical findings illuminate the fundamental role that federalism plays in the production of contemporary racial disparities and in the recent turn toward neoliberal and paternalist policies in American poverty governance.     

Do Welfare State Regimes Determine Public Sector Reforms? Choice Reforms in American,Swedish and German Schools

The idea that modern welfare states can be grouped into distinct regimes dominates contemporary studies of welfare state restructuring, and several studies have concluded welfare state reforms to be correlated with regime structures. These studies build, however, on analyses of only cash-benefit programmes whereas social services are almost neglected in current welfare state research. Thus, the aim of this article is to test the explanatory capacity of the welfare state regime perspective in relation to reforms in the service dimension of advanced welfare states – normally termed 'public sector reforms'. For this purpose, the author has conducted a focused comparison of the degree to which archetypical examples of the liberal regime (United States), the social democratic regime (Sweden) and the conservative regime (Germany) have introduced vouchers and parental choice into their public primary schools. Schools and education have ranked high on the public sector reform agenda since the 1980s, while the school choice issue signifies core aspects of the rationale of the reform movement: re-arranging public provision of services into quasi-markets. The article identifies, however, a clear lack of correlation between adoption of the school-choice policy and welfare state regimes. Instead, the reforms undertaken in all three countries seem closely related to the institutional rules of political decision making.     

Framing Deservingness to Win Support for Welfare State Retrenchment

Recent studies of welfare state retrenchment have argued that policy makers can win public support for welfare state reform by framing the issue in terms of deservingness of welfare recipients. However, this literature has not tested the argument at the individual level. Using a Scandinavian context, this experimental study investigates how alternative framing of a welfare state retrenchment proposal affects citizens' perception of welfare recipients' deservingness, policy support and whether perceptions of deservingness mediate policy opinion. A news story was manipulated to present welfare recipients as either deserving or undeserving of welfare benefits. This issue framing affected citizens' perception of deservingness as well as support for retrenchment policy. Opinion change was partly explained by differences in perceptions of deservingness. These results provide strong support for the effectiveness of the deservingness frame.     

Comparative Perspectives on Childcare Expansion in Germany: Explaining the Persistent East‒West Divide

Abstract

Germany’s family policy responded to the European Union’s Barcelona targets by expanding publicly funded childcare, especially for children under the age of three, throughout the country. While overall nearly 33 per cent of all children in that age group had access to public childcare by 2015, there is still a large difference between the situation in the eastern and the western part of the country. This paper documents and explains this development of two persistently different childcare regimes in the two parts of the country. It shows that supply factors such as local administrative capacity and resources interact with demand factors such as parental need and demands for public childcare to produce the divergent development. It then discusses the conceptual challenges involved in engaging in this type of subnationally comparative analysis.     

Venue Preference and Earthquake Mitigation Policy: Expanding the Micro‐Model of Policy Choice

Seismologists have reported that a majority of recent earthquakes in Oklahoma have been triggered by the activities of oil and gas companies. Despite this fact, there is evidence of strong opposition toward earthquake mitigation policy. In this article, we argue that how individuals define issues affect their policy choice. Furthermore, we incorporate the concept of venue shopping from the literature on macro theories of the policy process to investigate the effect of problem definition in shaping individual venue preference for policy choice. Using unique survey data, we find that problem definition, particularly issue causality and issue image, is strongly related to individual support for earthquake mitigation policy. However, a more nuanced relationship between individual problem definition and venue preference is observed. Our findings contribute to scholarly endeavors to understand the politics of problem definition at an individual level, which may be the precursor of understanding policy choices at the institutional level.     

The adult worker model family,gender equality and care: the search for new policy principles and the possibilities and problems of a capabilities approach

There is evidence that policy-makers in most Western welfare states are moving towards a new set of assumptions about the contributions that men and women make to families, based on an adult worker model. This paper first examines this shift in policy assumptions at the EU level and goes on to argue that there are real limits to the pursuit of a full adult worker model based on the commodification of care. In respect of gender equality, this in turn raises the issue of the terms and conditions on which such a shift in policy assumptions are made, particularly about the valuing and sharing of the unpaid work of care. The final part of the paper examines the possibilities offered by the capabilities approach of addressing these issues.     

Informed Preferences? The Impact of Unions on Workers' Policy Views

Despite declining memberships, labor unions still represent large shares of electorates worldwide. Yet their political clout remains contested. To what extent, and in what way, do unions shape workers' political preferences? We address these questions by combining unique survey data of American workers and a set of inferential strategies that exploit two sources of variation: the legal choice that workers face in joining or opting out of unions and the over‐time reversal of a union's policy position. Focusing on the issue of trade, we offer evidence that unions influence their members' policy preferences in a significant and theoretically predictable manner. In contrast, we find that self‐selection into membership accounts at most for a quarter of the observed “union effect.” The study illuminates the impact of unions in cohering workers' voice and provides insight on the role of information provision in shaping how citizens form policy preferences.     

Local government grants and income tax revenue: Redistributive politics in Norway 1900–1990

An important aspect of the welfare state is public provision of private goods, primarily education and health care. In Norway the provision of these services has been organized through the local public sector. The development of the welfare state has to a large extent been the development of welfare communes. The important revenue sources of the local and county governments, grants and income tax revenue, have been controlled nationally, and the paper addresses the determinants of these revenues during 1900–1990. The approach combines a demand model of local public services emphasizing price and income-elasticities with a political economy model of central government ideology and strength. The decision making is understood as bargaining between the government and interest groups, and the political structure consequently is of importance for the policy outcome. The analysis shows how politics matter, and the results indicate that a minority coalition government implies 30% more grant and income tax revenue to local and county governments than one party majority in the long run.     

Needs,welfare and the limits of associationalism

This paper presents a critical account of current associationalist proposals for welfare reform. It argues that contrary to the associationalists' own case, the institutional structure suggested by associationalism would not better provide for the needs of welfare recipients. After a detailed exposition of the fundamental claims of proponents of associational welfare, the paper challenger two of the key normative judgements that underlie the associational project. First, it criticizes the associationalist tendency to emphasize unregulated choice in welfare provision, arguing that such a settlement would ignore the important disinction between ‘needs’ and ‘preferences’. Second, it rejects the associationalists' acceptance of significant inequalities in welfare provision, suggesting that such inequlities would, almost by conceptual definition, leave many recipients' needs unfulfilled. The paper concludes by indicating that any proposed welfare reform intended to enhance provision for needs should be located within the current statist tradition.     

Fathers,Families and Work: Putting ‘Working Fathers’ in the Picture

This article is a review of Fathers, Families and Work, one of a series of reports published as part of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC)'s ‘Working Better’ programme. The article examines Fathers, Families and Work in the context of the wider conclusions and recommendations of the ‘Working Better’ programme and considers the extent to which these recommendations will translate into public policy. It concludes that there is a gap between parents' desire for both mothers and fathers to be involved in caring for children and the reality of long hours and inflexible workplaces that limits the time men can spend caring for children.