This paper is a first attempt to analyse the relationship between social protection systems and countries’ responses towards the regulation of platform work. It is argued that the degree of accessibility to social protection for self-employed workers is a predictor for how countries will deal with platform work. Countries that provide wide access to social protection for the self-employed tend to develop a more integrative response towards these work arrangements from a social protection perspective because the social protection of platform workers is a smaller policy challenge. On the other hand, in countries with a low degree of accessibility to social protection schemes, the response towards platform work is more confrontational. These responses are characterised by a larger number of court cases and legislative proposals because social protection for platform workers is a more pressing policy challenge and platform work arrangements are understood to be more antagonistic towards the respective social protection systems.

The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a debate around the world on whether pension systems should be used to support individuals in economic distress. In Latin America, Chile, Bolivia and Peru have passed legislation allowing withdrawals from pension pots, yet with some significant variation. We argue that these measures cannot be simply understood because of the COVID-19 emergency alone but should also take into consideration the combination of legacies from previous pension re-reforms and the political institutional setting. We find that where previous re-reforms have been difficult to implement or have not been implemented at all and the institutional setting makes change difficult, measures that lead to a significant amount of savings being withdrawn may be favoured by political actors as a way to break the stalemate. By contrast, where re-reforms have been largely implemented and the political institutional setting poses few barriers to change, withdrawals may be more limited.

Research shows that low-income groups are increasingly left behind economically and excluded from the policy-making process of advanced democratic societies. This suggests that governments do not sufficiently address the needs of the poor. In this article, we explore to what extent labour power positively influences redistribution and policies for society overall and for the poor in specific. Following standard political economy arguments, a powerful working class leads to more egalitarian forms of capitalism as they are the main beneficiaries from redistribution. But do social-democratic parties and trade unions also represent the poorest in society, those who participate less in political decision-making and whose jobs are often not covered by collective bargaining agreements? Using comparative time-series data for 23 OECD countries since the 1980s, the findings suggest a positive role of the Left, at least for trade unions on poverty reduction, but less for specific policies benefiting the poor.

Research on the welfare state often examines social policies in democratic regimes separately from social policies in authoritarian regimes. Two bodies of research have emerged, as the extant literature views these political systems as sufficiently distinct to merit the division of analysis. In this article, we challenge the existing approach by showing that differing regime types can indeed be analysed together. By looking for patterns of similarities, rather than differences, we bring the two literatures into conversation and show how a common factor can trigger social policy expansion in both regime types. Using case studies of India and China, the two most populous democratic and authoritarian regimes, this article illustrates how the expansion of policies that serve low-income groups – India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee (NREGA) and China’s Minimum Livelihood Guarantee Scheme (dibao) – were both prompted by social mobilisation.

This article analyses how life course events including education, citizenship, marriage status and having children would affect female migrant labour market integration. This is put in terms of employment status and job quality under the perspective of welfare and production regimes. To investigate different institutional effects, countries representative of these regimes’ typologies, such as the UK and Ireland for liberal market economies/liberal welfare states, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden for coordinated market economies (CME)/social democratic welfare states, alongside Germany and France for CME/conservative welfare states, were employed. European Social Survey data are adopted within a linear probability model, alongside a nested model aggregating life course events. Through these, migrant penalty is analysed regarding labour market outcomes with respect to natives. Among the life course events, education and citizenship acquisition showed a particularly strong impact on migrant penalty, while marriage and having a child did not significantly affect migrant penalty.