The Social Policy Digest is a major online resource providing up-to-date listings of developments across the whole range of social policy issues - including links to source materials and related commentaries. The Digest is published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Social Policy Association.

In this article, we discuss some of the new tensions that are emerging between the different foundations of the welfare state. Several developments have led to the advent of the social investment state, in which people are being activated and empowered instead of passively protected. We argue that this social policy shift has been accompanied by a normative shift towards a more stringent interpretation of social protection in which individual responsibility and quid pro quo have become the primordial focus. Using the Belgian (Flemish) disciplinary policy on truancy and school allowances as a case in point, we demonstrate that this social policy paradigm may have detrimental consequences for society's weakest: they will not always be able to meet the newly emerged standard of reciprocity. This implies an erosion of the ideal of social protection and encourages new forms of social exclusion. As these changes in the social policy framework are not confined to the Belgian case alone, our analysis bears relevance for all European welfare states.

European welfare states are cutting back their responsibilities for long-term care, emphasising ‘self-reliance’ and replacing care as an entitlement of citizenship with targeted services. But we do not know how former long-term care recipients cope with retrenchment and if they are able to negotiate support from their family and friends. Through an analysis of 500 telephone interviews and thirty face-to-face interviews with long-term care recipients facing reduced care rights in the Netherlands, we found that disabled and elderly persons resist increased dependence on their personal networks. Most clients who face reduced access to public long-term care do not seek alternative help despite their perceived need for it, and feel trapped between the policy definition of self-reliance and their own ideals of autonomy.

The politics of parenthood is a major battleground in disputes about gender equality. In contemporary debates on parental leave reform, notions about ‘equal’ parenthood and parental ‘choice’ compete. Earmarked leave for fathers, the so-called ‘daddy quota’ – a hallmark of Nordic welfare states, is increasingly being discussed in other types of welfare state. Further increases in earmarked leave is thus of interest to the policy debate in other countries, too. This article examines the reception among political actors in Norway of a proposal in 2008 to divide the existing parental leave into three equal parts – one for the father, one for the mother and one shared at the discretion of both parents. Three rival ideational policy paradigms are identified: fathers’ right to care and mothers’ right to breastfeed compete among quota protagonists, while ‘choice’ is advocated by quota antagonists. So far, quota protagonists guided by the mothers’ rights paradigm have been the most successful, but persistent, ideational tensions are rendering future developments uncertain.

This paper offers a discursive policy analysis of the 2010 UK Home Office Sexualisation of Young People Review, authored by Linda Papadopoulos (2010a). It will scrutinise the narrative presented by the text of the danger posed by cultural representations to healthy development, and trace the way that the text links this danger to catastrophic outcomes: child sexual abuse, exploitation and trafficking. Examining this narrative, the article will propose that the UK Review deploys spatial metaphors to naturalise a gendered account of childhood, sexuality and danger, evoking the creeping influence of a corrupting culture on a girl's most private self. The article will also demonstrate that this spatial narrative underpins the epistemological structure of the text – its separation of the primary from the secondary, the real from the artificial.

Since the end of the last century governments in many western welfare regimes have been keen to promote the marketisation of public service delivery. This requires changes in the supply of, and demand for, alternative providers in this market, and in particular for many governments this has included third sector providers. This article examines the attempt by the UK Labour government to promote the supply of social enterprises in the market for health and social care services in England, through the Social Enterprise Investment Fund (SEIF), introduced in 2007. The article reports on research evaluating the effectiveness of the SEIF, employing a ‘theories of change’ approach, drawing on a mix of administrative and survey data, qualitative interviews and case studies. The research found that although the SEIF had significant benefits in supporting the start up and growth of organisations, its contribution to their longer-term sustainability was more mixed as most were dependent on grants as a main source of income and were not in a position to compete for public sector contracts. This suggests that there may be limits to the role that public investment can play in such market making.

Increasing the conditionality of welfare benefits is a growing trend in many developed countries, particularly in relation to some groups who may be perceived as undeserving of state support. Problem drug users (PDUs) are one such group, and in the UK most PDUs do not work and a high proportion claim benefits. Facilitating the movement of these individuals into employment is a policy aim, because it is believed to improve the circumstances of drug users (and promote future abstinence) and because moving all groups off benefits and into work is a primary purpose of recent welfare reforms. Yet little is known about the interactions of PDUs with the UK benefits system or how recent moves to increase the conditionality of benefits are likely to affect this vulnerable group. This paper begins to address this gap by exploring the perceptions that PDUs and relevant frontline staff have of drug users’ interactions with the welfare system and the factors affecting their prospects for employment. The findings suggest some aspects of recent welfare reforms, notably the simplification of benefits, may help PDUs interact with the system. However, the data also reinforce claims that the increased use of sanctions is unlikely to succeed in improving employment rates amongst this group without intensive support and demand-side interventions.

This article contributes to the literatures on the governance of activation and the territorial structure of the welfare state by drawing attention to the institutional designs of active welfare states and the architectures of decentralisation, as well as to their manifestations and implications. With the end of capturing dissimilar intergovernmental models of activation, this paper develops a framework of ‘centre–regional’ relations, which we apply to the cases of Italy and Spain – two countries that have devolved active labour market policy powers to their regions but have organised power-sharing structures very differently. The findings suggest that when it comes to active welfare states, horizontal arrangements are linked to salient institutional variations across the territory. By contrast, hierarchical structures, which are characterised by a dominant role of central level governments, are linked to higher levels of cohesion. These findings are relevant as they expose the manifestations and implications of distinct decentralisation models on activation regimes, welfare states, as well as on welfare clients.

Urban–rural harmonisation has risen to prominence in recent social security reform in China. This article offers an account of the changing welfare institutions and social citizenship configurations unfolded by this particular policy approach. As social activism gained substantial weight as part of the regional developmental strategies of local governments, harmonisation efforts have led to a boundary shift of social citizenship largely defined by the within–without criterion rather than the urban–rural divide. In places where urban–rural harmonisation takes hold, the pivotal criterion for claiming social benefits is the possession of local resident status, regardless of whether this status is urban or rural. The heterogeneity of regional social security developments resulting from social decentralisation also calls attention to the ‘variable geometry’ of institutional change, i.e. various social policy domains manifest diverse degrees of institutional dynamics towards harmonisation. In this light, urban–rural harmonisation is likely to trigger competitive solidarity in terms of regional competition and emulation in economic development and social provision, leading to regional disparities that will shape the future contours of social policy and social citizenship in China.

Social scientists in the comparative policy tradition have long argued that welfare systems in modern capitalist societies can be broken down into ideal types. The idea of different worlds of welfare capitalism has an enduring appeal and growing practical policy relevance as governments seek to enhance population wellbeing. In this paper, we explore the worlds of welfare theory from the perspective of happiness. Drawing on data from the World Values Survey, we examine how welfare regimes may contribute to wellbeing and we consider the significance of our findings for the development of social policy. By using multilevel models, it is possible to separate out effects due to observed and unobserved, as well as both individual-level and country-level, welfare state characteristics and we can make inferences to the distribution of social wellbeing across welfare typologies. We find that respondents living in liberal and conservative countries experience at least twice the odds of unhappiness of those living in social democracies, after controlling for individual- and country-level explanatory variables. The observed differences between the worlds of welfare were found to be highly statistically significant.