Americanising Brexit Britain's Welfare State?

Will the British welfare state revert to an Americanisation trajectory or retain features of the European model after April 2019? After a period of historically prolonged austerity and substantial working age welfare reform, with the UK facing yet another renegotiation of the social contract in a post‐Brexit world, the question of whether there remains space for an alternative to the ‘American’ model is of crucial importance. We argue that there has been a blurring of differences across the American and European welfare states in terms of working age benefits, as most countries have adopted aspects of work‐based conditionality reforms, which attach the receipt of benefits to the active pursuit of work and, to varying extents, the underlying politics of US welfare reform, where there are large coalitions supportive of more punitive policies towards low‐income adults and minorities. These trends are taking place against the backdrop of a second major shift: increasing restrictions on benefits for immigrants. This double narrowing of the welfare state, making benefits conditional for citizens and excluding those who are not citizens, seemingly sets the agenda for a more restrictive post‐Brexit welfare state. The experience of the last two decades suggests, however, that the adoption of the American model has not been wholesale; steering a middle path between punitive conditional American benefits and more traditionally generous universal benefits is on the agenda across advanced welfare states.     

A New Progressive Coalition? The European Left in a Time of Change

This article examines changing patterns of voting for parties on the left in the UK and Europe. It shows that while combined support for social‐democratic, left and Green parties remains strong, the composition of the left's electorate has radically changed. Increasingly, left parties rely on a coalition of new middle‐class voters and traditional and new working‐class constituencies. This coalition is relatively cohesive on questions of economic redistribution, but divided on social and cultural issues. Recent instability in Labour's electoral coalition reflects broader structural trends facing left parties across Europe.     

When Bad (Good) Things Happen to Good (Bad) People: The Impact of Character Appraisal and Perceived Controllability on Judgments of Deservingness

When third parties judge the deservingness of outcomes experienced by others, what role does their appraisal of others' character play in their judgments? Two experiments examined this question by locating it within the framework of Feather's (1994a) theoretical analysis of deservingness. In both experiments, participants read 16 stories in which (a) people of good or bad character (b) experienced positive or negative outcomes in events (c) over which they had high or low control, then rated the extent to which each outcome was deserved. All three factors were found to affect ratings of deservingness, but the dominant influence was the Valence of Character × Valence of Outcome interaction. Outcomes were judged to be deserved when the valences attached to actors' character and their outcomes were congruent (either ++ or ??) and undeserved when the valences were incongruent (either +? or ?+). Most of the results supported Feather's formulations and, in addition, suggested how people integrate several perceptions into a composite judgment of deservingness.

     

Varying Costs to Change? Institutional Change in the Public Sector

Many scholars have argued that social programs are marked by a logic of “increasing returns” that makes change difficult. Yet over the past decades, reformers across industrialized countries have introduced substantial administrative reforms in these services, even as entitlement reform remains politically difficult. This paper explains these shifts by breaking apart the logic of “increasing returns” into three distinct “costs to change”: technical, political, and expectations. Decreases in a particular type of costs produce different logics of institutional change—back end, informal, and front end—that privilege the state, professionals or private, or political actors in distinct ways. I support these claims by reexamining three cases that were considered exemplars of stability but that ultimately had major entitlement reform: health care in the United Kingdom and United States and welfare programs in the United States. I show that even before radical reforms occurred, reformers introduced distinct logics of administrative change that underpinned later changes.