The 'dependent variable problem' remains a persistent challenge in the analysis of welfare state change, for which family policy is a prime case: it combines heterogeneous policy instruments spanning cash benefits, time-related entitlements, and services, each consisting of multiple design elements and underlying logics, making analyses of policy change sensitive to conceptual and measurement choices. Moreover, over the past two decades, as family policies have been a major site of welfare state restructuring, investigating and explaining change has been one of the core themes in family policy research. In this article, we ask how studies have theorised, conceptualised, and operationalised family policy change - what is counted as change, which processes and dimensions are foregrounded, and how these are translated into empirical indicators. For this, we conducted a qualitative systematic review using the PRISMA method. A Web of Science keyword search identified 122 articles published between 2003 and 2023 that focus on family policy change. The review maps the empirical terrain of the field - policy areas examined, publishing venues, and geographical coverage. It documents that while many studies on family policy change articulate clear theories and concepts, fewer explicitly operationalise how change is measured or traced empirically. There also seem to be trade-offs between conceptual depth and empirical scope or precision. The review highlights that, to advance comparative and cumulative knowledge in future family policy research, further refinement is needed - alongside broader geographical coverage - in defining 'policy change' and the processes and dimensions it entails, as well as in strengthening the links between conceptual clarity, operationalisation, and measurement.
This article examines the creation of the European Union’s (EU) Social Convergence Framework (SCF), introduced in 2024 as part of reforms to the EU’s economic governance system. Building on debates about the “socialisation” of the European Semester, we analyse why the SCF succeeded where the previously proposed Social Imbalances Procedure (SIP) failed. Taking a historical institutionalist approach and drawing on theories of gradual institutional change, we argue that the SIP represented an insurrectionary strategy aimed at displacing existing rules but faced insurmountable legal and political veto points. In contrast, the SCF emerged through a subversive layering strategy, designed by technical actors within the EU institutions to integrate social monitoring into the Semester without challenging its core economic framework. Using policy documents, Council debates, and interviews with key stakeholders, we demonstrate how institutional constraints, actor strategies, and political compromises shaped the SCF’s design. We argue that, while the SCF increases visibility for social indicators and may strengthen social objectives within EU governance, its reliance on soft law limits transformative potential. We conclude that the SCF reflects incremental institutional change, offering modest opportunities for further socialisation of the European Semester.
What does it mean for states to protect populations against climate change? As environmental risks are becoming more frequent and severe, the ability of states to maintain the wellbeing of their populations is challenged. Yet, despite growing debates about social-ecological risks and policies, the question of how to protect societies from the social consequences of environmental risks and disasters remains little addressed in social policy and welfare state studies and a critical gap in the literature. This article advances a research agenda for conceptualising social protection against environmental risks. We identify avenues for research for understanding the various forms of socialisation of environmental risks and the policies that protect populations against their impacts across Europe and North America. We analyse these policies from a conceptual, historical, and comparative perspective, looking at how they provide forms of welfare, how they interact with social policies, and how climate change transforms welfare states’ role in protecting populations against environmental risks in the context of just adaptation.
Continental European welfare states have been prone to growing levels of inequality in the post-industrial context. This outcome has been attributed to their historically evolved and regionally specific reliance on contributory social insurances. The status-preserving character of these systems has been considered a key mechanism reinforcing insider-outsider divides in employment and welfare and thereby contributing to a decline in the overall redistributive capacity of the welfare state. Drawing on the Austrian case from a comparative perspective, we shed new light on these claims and point to the conditions under which social insurance systems can promote solidaristic solutions and remain politically resilient in challenging times, whereas means-tested benefit schemes tend to be more fragile and contested as they become politicised along welfare chauvinist lines. We conclude from the Austrian case that generous social insurance schemes can be a viable tool to reconcile the deservingness conceptions of the political right the with the solidaristic outcomes favoured by the political left in contemporary welfare politics.
This article examines the impact of interstate wars on the development of the Bulgarian welfare state. Drawing on extensive primary sources, it shows that military conflicts were a major catalyst for the introduction and expansion of social policy in a predominantly agrarian society under authoritarian rule. In the course of the five interstate wars in which Bulgaria was involved between 1879 and 1944, a variety of welfare measures were adopted, including social protection for soldiers and veterans, social insurance programmes, labour protection legislation and pro-natalist family policies. These reforms stemmed from the strategic efforts of authoritarian elites to secure political loyalty, social cohesion and internal stability under conditions of mass mobilisation and war crisis. The article contributes to comparative welfare state research in three ways. First, it shows that autocratic regimes pursue selective social policies, particularly with pension policy, targeting occupational groups that are crucial to regime survival and state capacity. Second, it shows that large-scale military mobilisation forces even authoritarian governments to extend social protection to new groups of beneficiaries. Third, the Bulgarian case illustrates that democracy is neither a necessary condition nor a conditioning factor for postwar welfare state expansion, underscoring the tremendous impact of wars on social policy. The study contributes to a more global and historically grounded account of the emergence of the welfare state and calls for further research on the role of warfare in shaping social policy development in Eastern Europe and the Global South.
The literature on pension reform presents pension indexation as an effective tool for 'quiet retrenchment' performed through automatic formulas that obscure real losses in purchasing power. But so far, we lacked comparative studies of the long-term patterns of adjustment rates applied to old-age pensions that could substantiate that view. This paper presents an original country-year dataset of such rates across 20 EU countries (2002-2024), accompanied by a review of national rules and reforms, and evaluates long-term indexation outcomes against inflation and wage growth benchmarks. Findings show that those outcomes are anchored primarily in macroeconomic trajectories and political decisions rather than codified formulas. There is no evidence of sustained loss of purchasing power through under-indexation, with only modest losses recorded in several countries. Conversely, all countries have under-indexed relative to wages, pointing to a decline in the relative material status of long-term pensioners. European indexation regimes cluster on shared economic trajectories, not formal indexation rules, and indexation's adherence to inflation does not correlate with its adherence to wage growth. Overall, indexation formulas appear as weak commitment devices. Indexation remains publically salient, and governments continuously resort to ad-hoc adjustments in benefit levels, whether to pursue fiscal consolidation or to signal generosity.
European statistics and policies commonly rely on household typologies that classify households based on the number of adults and children living together. However, these typologies overlook family relationships and classify any non-standard arrangement into a broad residual category of ‘other’. This approach fails to capture increasing family diversity across Europe and introduces a persistent North-Western bias into data and policymaking. As a result, families that do not fit conventional models may be misclassified or entirely overlooked in poverty assessments and policy targeting. This is problematic since family structures vary substantially across European countries and became more diverse over time. This article introduces the Families in Households Typology (FHT), a classification system that uses relationship identifiers in EU-SILC microdata to reconstruct family structures within households. The FHT reduces the share of individuals placed in the residual ‘other’ category from over 20% to around 5%, particularly improving identification in Southern, Central, and Eastern European countries where multigenerational living arrangements are common. The results also show that nearly half of all single parents in Europe live with another adult and are not captured as single parents under conventional typologies. This has important implications for policy design: many single-parent households may be excluded from targeted support due to misclassification. Reclassifying households using the FHT also reshapes our understanding of living standards. The poverty risk of single parents is often overestimated when the Eurostat household typology is adopted. When single parents co-residing with kin or unrelated adults are correctly identified, their average poverty risk tends to be much lower. These findings highlight the importance of moving away from basic household counts towards relational classifications that more accurately reflect the diversity of family life across Europe, rather than using typologies that reflect the dominant family reality in Northern and Western Europe.
This study examines the political determinants of parenting leave policy across 21 OECD countries from 1970 to 2021. While prior research has linked parenting leave expansion to social democratic and Christian democratic governments, this paper argues that party positions in the two-dimensional ideological space-socio-economic left-right and socio-cultural libertarian-authoritarian-better explain policy preferences. Using mixed-effects ordered logit models, the analysis reveals that socio-cultural rather than socio-economic positions drive parenting leave expansion. Governments with libertarian socio-cultural orientations are more likely to extend paid maternity, paternity, and parental leave for both mothers and fathers. These findings remain robust even when controlling for party family, indicating that the influence of Christian democratic and social democratic governments stems from their shifts towards libertarian positions. The study provides new insights into the partisan determinants of parenting leave policy, highlighting the role of socio-cultural competition in shaping welfare state transformations in post-industrial democracies.
The European Union's ageing societies poses major policy challenges for pension systems. Since the economies and the societies of Member States are increasingly integrated, the success and failure of national pension policies and reforms have an ever-increasing impact beyond national borders. However, the 'subsidiarity principle' and member state autonomy over taxes, limits the EU's power regarding pension policy. This paper explores the influence of the European Semester discourse on recent pension reforms in the Netherlands and Ireland. We draw on discursive institutionalism (DI) to understand further the nature and form of European Semester driven pension reform ideas and how they are communicated and acted on, in each country. Based on the evidence on pension reform in The Netherlands and Ireland, we find a divergence in effectiveness between cognitive and normative ideas in EU discourse and that cognitive ideas are privileged over normative ideas with respect to influencing pension policy reforms. While the focus of this research is pension policy, this study enhances our understanding of how the EU approach in terms of its discourse, influences national reform in policy areas where the 'subsidiarity principle' applies. We suggest that policymakers and other actors may very consciously choose one form of discourse over the other to negotiate their preferred pathway towards implementation.
This study explores how the European Union (EU) governs care provision in member states through the European Semester and its Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs). Introduced after the economic crisis, the Semester has became a targeted tool for shaping national care policies and regimes, complementing EU measures like family leave directives and childcare targets. Our qualitative analysis of CSRs from 2011-2024, focused on policy orientations and policy frames, shows that the European Semester has been pivotal in the EU's strategy to shape care policies and systems in member states-a field that belongs to member state competences but is essential to the EU's social and economic objectives. The European Commission has consistently used the Semester to encourage care-related reforms. While social investment frame aimed at promoting women's employment is prominent, a cost-cutting approach implying market solutions and family responsibilities remains strong for long-term care. We suggest that the European Semester aims to align national care regimes, fostering a European model based on a fiscally sustainable balance between unpaid care provided by families and care provided by states and markets and underpinned by a commodifying script.
Despite much research on citizens' welfare deservingness considerations, the literature typically overlooks the diverse meanings individuals attribute to their stances on the issue. The same welfare deservingness stance might mean something fundamentally different across individuals, ranging from perceiving it as, for example, an issue of economic redistribution to an issue of cultural values. This diversity in meanings has significant implications for our understanding of welfare solidarity. While recent qualitative studies have explored these nuances, this study offers an innovative quantitative approach to uncover the distinct meanings citizens attribute to their welfare deservingness considerations. Utilizing correlational class analysis on data from an original representative survey of Dutch citizens (n = 2131), I uncover five distinct meanings of welfare deservingness: (1) conventional progressive versus conservative; (2) (dis)trust of ethnic others; (3) economic (anti-)chauvinism; (4) moralized redistribution; and (5) traditional versus inclusive solidarity. These different meanings each include individuals with both lenient and strict stances on welfare deservingness. The social bases of these meanings differ substantively, as groups with distinct characteristics adhere to them, based on differences in, for example, socioeconomic position, educational level, and political preferences. These findings reveal that different groups have fundamentally different things in mind when they think about the welfare deservingness of others. As this study provides a stepping stone for meaning-oriented research on welfare attitudes more broadly, its implications are discussed for social policy analysis, as well as avenues for future research.
Mediterranean welfare states have generally been treated as a homogeneous group; a 'family of sinners' that requires structural reforms to tackle persistent problems. While this applied until the Great Recession, new evidence suggests significant departures from this trajectory. Why did Mediterranean countries move from dualization and retrenchment to more generous measures in 2020, especially in outsiders' protection? Taking the pandemic as a symmetric shock, we investigate welfare state responses in three Mediterranean regimes - Spain, Portugal and Italy. We find that, while all three departed from past austerity logics, Spain adopted a more encompassing response, entailing generous support towards both core and peripheral workers. Italy and Portugal, instead, persisted in a dual model of core segment protection with transfers for the most vulnerable. Drawing on interview and documentary data, we explain this divergence with the interplay between policy learning on the Left and patterns of 'crisis corporatism'.
A strand of the social policy literature investigates who the general public deems deserving of benefits or other types of assistance from public money. This is based on a deservingness heuristic - the judgmental shortcuts people use to make choices. We apply this to direct solidarity towards people who beg through a discrete choice experiment (DCE), the first study to apply the DCE approach to assess direct solidarity choices towards people in extreme poverty. This method allows for revealing preferences that are otherwise difficult to estimate reliably in non-experimental designs of questionnaire research. We assess passers-by's criteria when deciding whether to give alms to beggars. We use pairs of digital illustrations of individual beggars depicting a combination of four attributes (gender, ethnicity, disability, and the presence of an infant). Respondents in the public space of Brussels are asked to choose between giving alms to one of the beggars and opting out, which means they do not give at all. Approximately 80% of respondents gain positive marginal utility from giving alms to disabled beggars and beggars with children. Most striking, however, is the ethnic dislike: some 70% of respondents derive a negative utility from giving alms to Roma beggars.
Since the launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights in 2017, the EU has witnessed a marked revival in social policy-making. Existing research highlights the role of institutional entrepreneurs and advocacy coalitions, but tends to overlook the dynamics within Member States themselves. This paper examines how and why support for EU social policy has evolved among two long-standing sceptics: Sweden and the Netherlands. In the 2000s and early 2010s, both exhibited a strong 'subsidiarity reflex' aimed at shielding domestic welfare and labour-market institutions, yet their trajectories have diverged significantly in recent years. Sweden has remained defensive and increasingly politicised in its stance, whereas the Netherlands has shifted toward a more constructive and strategically engaged approach. Drawing on interviews with ministers, officials and social partner organisations, complemented by government documents, parliamentary records and secondary sources, we trace how national positions have developed across key EU social initiatives. We argue that neither institutional misfit nor politics alone can explain these divergent patterns. Instead, differences in administrative coordination - shaping opportunities for bureaucratic learning, strategic recalibration and cognitive reframing - are crucial for understanding how Member States navigate the expanding EU social agenda. The analysis shows that preferences for 'social Europe' are more contingent and adaptable than accounts focused on structural interests or party politics suggest. By opening the black box of national EU coordination processes, the paper advances debates on the drivers of social integration and demonstrates how internal administrative dynamics condition the capacity of governments to engage with, resist or reinterpret EU-level social policy initiatives.
Dual vocational education and training (VET) is said to have positive economic effects. However, recent contributions suggest that the rise of the knowledge economy may undermine these positive effects because university-educated workers are better suited for the new knowledge-intensive jobs. This paper provides the first evidence on the relationship between dual VET and wage inequality in mature knowledge economies. Using a new dataset on 37 advanced economies from 1996 to 2020, we find that dual VET is associated with lower levels of wage inequality. This negative association is particularly strong in the lower half of the wage distribution, which suggests that academically weaker students are the main beneficiaries of dual VET. Using three different indicators of the knowledge economy, we find, contrary to the fears often espoused in the literature, no clear evidence that the knowledge economy erodes this negative association between dual VET and wage inequality.
The complex interactions between the pension and the tax system remain understudied. We analyse how personal income tax systems of European countries contribute to fulfilling the two main objectives of pensions systems, notably safeguarding living standards after retirement and preventing old age poverty. We construct a hypothetical dataset that allows us to calculate the counterfactual tax burden of pensioners should their income be treated as employment income, rather than pension income. This allows to study to what extent the differential tax treatment of pensions complies with principles of horizontal and vertical equity and to what extent it impacts on poverty outcomes. We find that tax treatment of pension incomes differs substantially across countries. In most countries, the tax burden on pension income is lower than that of employment income, so that differential tax treatment contributes to maintenance of living standards of pensioners. This difference in tax burden is, as we demonstrate, not a general finding as it differs across countries as well as over the income distribution. In terms of poverty protection, we find a limited, though mostly positive role of the tax treatment of pensions: in some countries poverty among pensioners would be higher if taxed as employees. Our results emphasize the importance of taking a broader view on pension policies, as focusing only on the side of pension benefits disregards the effect of the tax system.
This study examines whether, and under what conditions, unpaid and paid care work are associated with reduced psychological wellbeing. The article begins by laying out a shared theoretical framework for understanding the psychological consequences of care among both unpaid and paid carers. It then tests the empirical implications of this framework, conducting multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey and European Social Survey data and: (1) disaggregating care work based on (a) the care recipient - i.e., adults or children - for unpaid carers and (b) the level of occupational professionalization for paid carers; and (2) examining the potential intervening role of social expenditure. Findings demonstrate that unpaid caring for adults (though not children) is associated with a marginal decrease in psychological wellbeing, but that this dynamic is limited to countries with smaller welfare states. Among paid care workers, only paraprofessionals are found to have lower levels of psychological wellbeing than comparable non-care workers - but here again increased social expenditure appears to have a significant buffering effect. Together, results reinforce the need for robust social spending to mitigate negative psychological consequences of care, while adding important nuance regarding the relevance of the type of care work being performed.
Digital labor platforms are reshaping global labor markets by enabling the transnational contracting of service workers. While the dominant perspective emphasizes market forces, predicting that lower-wage countries will dominate the supply side, this view overlooks the institutional context in which platform labor emerges. This paper advances the argument that national welfare institutions are key to shaping participation in the platform economy. We provide the first large-scale cross-national comparative analysis of platform labor, combining micro-level data from one of the world's largest remote work platforms with country-level indicators from 26 European countries. In line with market expectations, we find that lower-wage countries supply most low-skilled labor, while higher-wage countries show a more balanced distribution between low- and high-skilled workers. Crucially, however, our analysis reveals that greater welfare state generosity is associated with lower levels of platform participation, especially in low-skilled occupations. We argue that platform labor cannot be understood solely as a function of technological change or wage differentials. It is also an expression of structural constraints: where social protections are weak, people are more likely to turn to precarious forms of online work.
Mainstream/statutory Micro-Enterprise-and-Employment-Support-Services (MEESS) have delivered poor outcomes for disadvantaged individuals and deprived areas. In contrast, alternative third-sector socially-orientated MEESS show promising results but their well-recognised repertoire of 'best practice' remains under-theorised. This study addresses that gap using qualitative data from an innovative MEESS programme in deprived areas of England and France. Drawing on key-informant interviews and client 'voices', we explore how and why these alternative MEESS better engage disadvantaged people. Through a process-philosophy and life-course lens, we find that practitioners operate with a strength-building logic - emphasising responsive, place-embedded and long-term support that helps individuals reconnect with their aspirations. Our analysis highlights the importance of relational, tailored support in advancing inclusive enterprise/employment outcomes.
There is an emerging body of literature on sustainable welfare suggesting that Europe needs sustainable welfare policies to mitigate the crises of environmental destruction and growing social inequalities. However, research about how such policies are politically embraced within the EU context is less developed. Therefore, based on sustainable welfare as a normative framework, this article focuses on political parties at the EU level and evaluates the ideologies and discourses that underpin their election manifestos. Critical discourse analysis and theories of postcolonial intersectionality are used to examine the 2024 election manifestos of what were then the three largest Europarties in the EU: European People’s Party (EPP), Party of European Socialists (PES) and Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE). The findings indicate that the manifestos focus on economic growth, European superiority and the subordination of nature and non-humans. In contrast, the normative framework of sustainable welfare denotes a combination of social and environmental sustainability over economic growth and values solidarity with nature, non-humans and people in all parts of the world. Therefore, this article suggests that the Europarties do the direct opposite of aligning with sustainable welfare–reinforcing unsustainable welfare in Europe.
