Over the last decades, governments in the advanced democracies have put greater pressure on the unemployed to seek and accept employment. This development has been pointed out in much prior research, yet relatively little is known about the exact changes that have been introduced. This paper fills this gap. It draws on a novel time-series cross-section dataset on the strictness of unemployment benefit conditions and sanctions in 21 democracies between 1980 and 2012, and shows in which aspects these rules have become stricter – and in which not. The paper confirms that there has been a general trend toward tighter conditions and sanctions, but adds some important qualifications: Many rules and provisions have also been adapted in response to the emergence of new social risks and there is also a noticeable trend toward more clearly defined and precise rules. Based on these findings, new causal hypotheses are suggested.

Social investment in Europe has primarily been measured by studying expenditure data from specific categories of social policy. This article argues that we need a more nuanced way of studying the presence of social investment, and develops a tool for measuring the ideational content of social investment in policy regulations. By operationalising three key policy dimensions of social investment; time, distribution and policy coherence, varying approaches of social investment are discerned, landing in the development of three ideal types: a strict social investment, a targeted social investment and a reactive social investment. To demonstrate its application, the social investment ideal-types are applied to cases of policies for unemployed youth in different European countries. The operationalisation and ideal types presented in this article provide a structure and nuance to the understanding and measuring of social investment, aiding in the further debate on its pros, cons and presence in European social policy.

Social investment has become a buzzword in recent years. The concept is not always precise or being used in the same way in all European countries. The central tenet of the social investment approach is to treat public expenditures not just as an economic burden, but also as an investment in the future. This is also a part of the development in the discourse. The social investment perspective is an example of how new ideas might influence social policy development. However, the use of the concept at the political level does not imply that it is also known by stakeholders. The article explains the dichotomy between the use of a concept on an overarching political and academic level with a practical understanding among actors without using the concept. The article concludes that social investment can be used in the field and that actors have an understanding hereof.

There has been quite a considerable amount of debate over the last decade about the importance of quality assessment in the field of LTC provision in Portugal, framed by the discourse on social investment. In a context of limited resources, care providers are pressured to demonstrate creation of value. Quality assessment becomes one of the paths to demonstrate worthiness. This, however, has not translated into standardised protocols of evaluation of impacts and quality in particular. The question has been asked why is that? In this article we contribute to answering this question by looking at the discourses of stakeholders on the topic of social investment and quality in LTC. Overall there is a discourse that acknowledges the importance of assessing investments and quality as a reliable proxy to measure return on investments, although there is a general difficulty in translating social investment and the quest for quality into specific examples and tools.

Ageing of society and long-term care (LTC) for the elderly are becoming hot topics on most European countries’ social and economic policy agendas. Increasing demand for the financing of LTC raises the necessity for a search for social policy alternatives without further increasing pressure on national budgets. The social investment approach is seen as an argument in favour of interpreting social expenditure as a ‘productive factor’ (ILO. (2005). Social protection as a productive factor. GB.294/ESP/4. Geneva, p. 2). This approach to welfare systems argues that social expenditure might be seen as investment that produces economic and social returns in time. The perception of what social investment is in relation to the LTC for the elderly is not clear either in public or academic discussion. In responding to this lacuna, this article analyses the views of LTC stakeholders in Lithuania concerning: the system and its challenges; what factors they consider as most significant to successful LTC policies and their implementation; and how the concept of social investment should be understood.