India’s main food and nutrition security programme, the Public Distribution System (PDS), provides subsidised rice and sugar to deprived households. Using longitudinal data from Young Lives for Indian children (n = 2,944) aged 5 to 16 years, we assessed whether PDS subsidies skewed diets towards sugar and rice consumption, increasing risk of stunting (low height-for-age). Linear regression models were used to quantify additional rice and sugar consumption associated with accessing the PDS, and the association with stunting linked to consumption. Controlling for sociodemographics, accessing the PDS was positively, significantly associated with consumption of rice (30g/day) and sugar (7.05g/day). There was no evidence that this increase corresponded to nutritional improvements. Each 100g increase in daily rice intake was associated with a lower height-for-age z-score (HAZ) and no decline in stunting. Results were robust to alternative model specifications. There was no evidence that receipt of PDS rice and sugar was associated with improvements in child nutrition.

This article explores the response of the child welfare system in Germany to the recent refugee crisis. Drawing on administrative data and qualitative interviews with administrators, front-line workers and refugee youth in Nuremberg, the article provides a contextualized account of how the crisis led to the collapse of established bureaucratic procedures, new forms of interagency collaboration and a flexible distribution of responsibilities and tasks. Combining a street-level bureaucracy (SLB) perspective with insights from the literature on crisis and policy change, the analysis shows how the responses of front-line workers effectively altered the content of services, introduced new actors and expanded the professional capacity of the local child welfare system. On a broader level, the findings indicate that front-line practice is not merely guided by policy mandates, but also responds to situational and institutional circumstances. For the child welfare system in Nuremberg, the findings raise important questions about the extent to which aspects of the crisis response will remain a part of the service delivery process moving forward, and whether the recent experience will better prepare them for future crises.

The rise of flexible employment in advanced democracies has been predominantly studied in the insider-outsider framework of the dualization literature. However, against the background of rising income inequality, it seems questionable to assume that all labor market insiders are equally affected by flexibilization. This paper explores whether flexibilization increases wage inequality among labor market insiders. I argue that flexibilization exposes insiders to a set of wage risks that are concentrated among low- and middle-income insiders, creating downward wage pressure on those insiders. The empirical analysis, covering 22 democracies between 1985 and 2016, finds that the deregulation of non-standard employment is associated with declining wage shares of low-income and middle-income earners, while top earners benefit. These major distributional shifts imply an important qualification of the dualization literature: rather than pitting insiders against outsiders, flexibilization ‘at the margins’ seems to exacerbate divides among insiders.

Paid employment has been viewed by successive governments in the UK as critical in making transitions out of homelessness, even when combined with problems like substance misuse, criminality or mental ill health. This article presents evidence from a study that sought to subject this belief to critical examination by exploring the relationship between promoting employability and other aspects of resettlement in the lives of a sample of thirty people experiencing homelessness and complex needs. Participants were interviewed twice at six to nine-month intervals to explore their changing motivations and perceptions of housing, work, relationships and hopes for the future.

Analysis used ‘pathways’ imagery to locate participants along an integrated pathway to understand how these factors related to one another in the pursuit of resettlement. We conclude that all respondents valued work, but its pursuit depended on the structural obstacles that participants faced. People’s location along a resettlement pathway was determined by their sense of control over circumstances, their success in overcoming barriers and the presence of significant others in their lives, and the pursuit of employment among homeless people needs to take account of progress in their resettlement journeys and the place of work in their aspirations.

Reducing social assistance dependency is high on the political agenda; labour market and social exclusion of youth, in particular, has been considered worrisome. With these policy objectives and societal considerations in mind we set to study the association between health problems, with a specific focus on mental health, and the duration of social assistance receipt among young adults in Finland. Our analyses are based on rich register data encompassing the total population in the metropolitan area of Finland from 2005 to 2016. We follow a cohort of new social assistance recipients (n=36,728) aged 18–34 for a maximum of 60 months using Cox proportional hazard model. The results show a strong association between mental health problems and duration of social assistance receipt. The association was the strongest among those aged 18–24. Some differences in the strength of the association were found for different psychiatric diagnoses. On the other hand, somatic diagnoses were only weakly associated with duration of social assistance receipt. Mental health problems appear to be an important obstacle for exiting social assistance and this should be taken into account when governments aim to decrease welfare dependency and reform the last-resort financial aid.

In this paper we explore whether the recent rise in food bank usage in the UK has been induced by the roll-out of Universal Credit. We bring together official statistics on the introduction of Universal Credit with data on food bank usage from the UK’s largest food bank network. We test the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution using a range of causal identification strategies (such as fixed-effects model, Granger causality tests, and matching designs) and consistently find that an increase in the prevalence of Universal Credit is associated with more food parcel distribution. We also find that the relationship between Universal Credit and food parcel distribution is stronger in areas where food banks are active, suggesting food insecurity arising from Universal Credit may be hidden in places where food banks are largely unavailable. Though it is challenging to implement any large-scale change to social security, our analysis suggests systemic and persistent problems with this new system. Whilst the logic of Universal Credit is intuitively appealing, it has also proven to be unforgiving, leaving many struggling to make ends meet.

Service integration is a global trend aiming to create partnerships, cost-effectiveness and joined-up working across public and third sector services to support an ageing population. However, social policy research suggests that the policy making process behind integration and implementation is complex, contradictory and full of tension. This paper explores social policy integration at the ground-level of services in the health and housing sector within a new integrated model for housing for older people. The paper applies a critical Lipskian approach to show that housing can promote integration for both users and wider stakeholders. Front-line workers were central to service integration, often working to integration principles despite policy changes and uncertainty. Challenges of social policy integration include the gaps between policy and practice and the developing nature of interaction at the ground-level – most notably, the role of technology. Technology and digital health platforms could enhance service user and practitioner interactions at the ground-level. The paper calls for renewed focus on policy processes in relation to service integration and consideration of new forms of service user, practitioner and policy maker interaction.

Public support for the welfare state – and the policies constituting it – has long been a topic of research. Previous research on support for redistribution has tended to focus on how either country-level characteristics (particularly those relating to the macro-economy such as levels of economic development or income inequality) or individual-level political factors (such as left-right political orientation and sociodemographic factors) shape support for redistribution. To date, empirical research has insufficiently tested how macroeconomic context and individual political orientations interact. Research has also obscured whether the effects of macroeconomic context hold cross-sectionally (across country contexts) or longitudinally (within countries over time). Drawing on data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this article examines the cross-sectional (between-country) and longitudinal (within-country) interactive relationships involving economic development and income inequality (on one hand) and left–right political orientations (on the other) in shaping preferences for redistribution. Results indicate that there are larger left–right cleavages in attitudes in wealthier countries, more unequal countries, and countries where inequality is increasing. These findings challenge the dominant practice of focusing exclusively on additive effects of individual-level or country-level factors by showing the importance of paying attention to cross-level interactions.

This study evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of defamilization as a concept for analysing state-market-family relationships in comparative perspective. A paradox has emerged around defamilization in the last decade; its use in empirical large-N research has grown markedly despite mounting criticism in theoretical discussions. Applying criteria of conceptual goodness, we find that the popularity of the concept is based on its high degree of parsimony, theoretical utility and field utility, but that there are problems with the resonance, coherence and differentiation of the concept. We argue that defamilization is most coherent and has greatest utility if the concept’s roots in welfare state theory are fully acknowledged. In our view, this means that defamilization is best understood a) alongside the separate concept of familization, b) as a multidimensional concept in terms of economic and social dependencies in family relationships, and c) as a means of addressing both gender and intergenerational dependencies. Although suitable for operationalization in empirical research, the concept hence imposes high demands regarding the required data and possible analyses.

This study assesses the impact of South Carolina’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, Family Independence (FI), on the longitudinal earnings of three cohorts of new entrants who entered the study before, at the beginning of, and at the height of the 2007-2009 recession. Applicants who began the application process but did not enroll in TANF were propensity-score matched to entrants by background characteristics including pre-intervention earnings history, and served as the comparison group. We constructed a latent growth curve model to test whether earnings histories were similar for the program and comparison groups up until FI intake, to estimate program impact by comparing post-intake earnings of program participants to those of the comparison group, and to determine the statistical significance of cohort differences in program impact. The findings showed FI had a positive impact on the earnings of participants before the recession. The effect became weaker during the state’s period of rising unemployment, and disappeared during the worst economic recession in decades. This study demonstrates the usefulness of longitudinal administrative data, propensity score matching, and latent growth modeling techniques for evaluating the impact of program interventions.