The Social Policy Digest went online in the summer of 2003. This means that the Digest, which used to be printed as part of the Journal of Social Policy, is now only available via the web.

In April 2002 Jobcentre Plus started to operate in the UK, bringing together the service of the Benefits Agency and the Employment Service. Offering a fully integrated benefit-claiming and work placement/job-seeking service for people of working age, this new organisation aims to strengthen the link between welfare and work. Due to the magnitude of the associated organisational change, the national roll out of the new organisation is being implemented gradually over a transitional period ending in 2006. During this transitional period some local offices are fully integrated while others' functions remain split between pre-existing Benefits Agency and Employment Service offices. In this article we examine how changes in the level of integration within districts over time affected performance with respect to job entries, customer service and benefit service delivery. Our analysis suggests that Jobcentre Plus has a clear positive effect on job entry outcomes for all client groups, a negative effect on business delivery, while it has neither a positive nor a negative effect on customer service outcomes.

Within the literature on retrenchment policies, the ‘solidarity-decline thesis’ is discussed. It is argued that current welfare state restructuring leads to a decrease in the actual social cohesion of society because redistributive public benefits are cut. The article addresses this thesis by presenting empirical evidence on social security based on collective bargaining. In Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands, collective agreements are increasingly used to regulate and finance social benefits. These collectively negotiated benefits may compensate to a certain degree for solidarity losses caused by retrenchment policies. The article reviews concepts of solidarity used in the literature and develops a two-dimensional scheme of four different concepts. The conclusion for comparative welfare state research is twofold. First, when viewing policies of welfare state retrenchment, the research should systematically include industrial relations in its frame of reference. Second, further studies should analyse the politics as well as the outcomes of collectively negotiated benefits more systematically. Under certain conditions, which are worth specifying, collective bargaining may lead to complex public–private mixes that shift welfare states in other directions than outright market liberalisation, not only in factual but also in normative terms.

Conventional theoretical models of the welfare state have difficulties in accounting for the recent expansion of family policies in mature welfare states. This article uses an idea-centred approach, the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), to understand recent family policy change in Switzerland. In a review of conflicts over the introduction of paid maternity leave as well as child day care during the 1990s, two competing advocacy coalitions were identified. The first coalition aimed at restricting government programmes to the prevention of poverty of families, whereas the second advocated the inclusion of measures for the promotion of gender equality. Towards the end of the 1990s, some members of the first advocacy coalition revised their policy core beliefs and changed coalitions, as a consequence of cognitive framing strategies pursued by gender equality advocates. This led to a power shift within the family policy subsystem, resulting in major change of government programmes at all state levels. It is concluded that, on the basis of the ACF, family policy expansion can be coherently traced back to value orientations and cognitive processes.

Across industrialised countries, men contribute one-third of the household time in domestic tasks despite women's rising labour force participation. Like a Russian doll, however, the private sphere of the household nests within broader socio-political institutions. Proposed here is a relative gender power model incorporating both individual and policy-derived resources to explain differences in the division of household tasks. The sensitivity of the model to state-level policy differences is tested using data from the second wave of the US National Survey of Families and Households. After controlling for women's individual resources, laws and policies enhancing women's economic circumstances in the event of a divorce such as receipt of transfers, child support and property settlement predict that men in couples perform a greater share of domestic tasks. This evidence confirms that the state can ameliorate gender hierarchies and inequality.

This study explores the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of gender mainstreaming logic, paying special attention to women's bureaux in Korea. In response to international pressures for gender mainstreaming, the Korean government has established or relocated women's bureaux since the 1990s. At first glance, it appears that the government in Korea has been keen to integrate gender issues into the entire policy process. However, closer investigation draws a very different picture. Qualitative findings from interviews with civil servants in Korean women's bureaux show that the bureaux are characterised by ‘institutionalised powerlessness’ in terms of peripheral structural arrangements, visible and invisible resistance from inside and outside government bureaucracy, and a lack of staff commitment. Therefore, it is hard to draw the conclusion that gender mainstreaming via the systematisation of women's bureaux would ever go beyond symbolic gestures in Korea.

Discourses of citizenship have increasingly featured in social policies aimed at young people, particularly in relation to the promotion and crafting of ‘active citizens’. The inclusion of citizenship education in school curricula, the Learning and Skills development agency post-16 citizenship development programme, and the recent Green Paper Youth Matters, all speak of instilling in young people the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. In this article we draw on empirical work on youth transitions to explore the ways in which citizenship is learnt and lived by young people themselves. The article draws on some of the models of citizenship identified by Lister et al. (2003) in their study on young people's perceptions of citizenship, particularly considering them in relation to the gendered experiences and realities of youth transitions to adulthoods.

This article contributes to the debate about retirement age and the extent to which occupational pensions influence the decision to retire. It uses the waves of Labour Force Survey (1984–91) and Quarterly Labour Force Survey (1992–2003) to review the changes in the actual average retirement age in the UK during the period 1984–2003 by gender and ethnicity. The article investigates the link between occupational pension schemes and the actual retirement age of men and women. It explores the impact of pension type on employees' expected retirement age and the decision to take early retirement using the English Longitudinal Survey of Ageing (2002–03).

A paradigm shift in pension policy decided by the German red–green coalition government will considerably affect the level and structure of pension benefits as well as the mix of public and private old-age security arrangements. The article starts with a brief outline of the pension schemes as they had been designed before the recent decisions, and with a few remarks on the reasons for current reform debates. The major measures of the 2001 Pension Reform are then described. The focus of the article is on the effects of the reform for (personal) income distribution and institutional design. A partial shift from (mandatory) public (pay-as-you-go financed) pensions to (voluntary) private (capital-funded) pensions and from defined benefit towards defined contribution will, among other things, reduce the benefit level in the social pension insurance. A large number of contributors – even after many years of paying contributions – will only receive benefits below the social assistance level. It can be expected that this development will transform the present earnings-related statutory pension scheme – which has a strong contribution–benefit link and is aimed at income smoothing over the lifecycle – into a basic, highly redistributive pension scheme, aimed mainly at avoiding poverty. Income inequality in old age is expected to increase as a result of the new strategy in pension policy.