Sexual minorities’ rights have substantially advanced across high-income countries over the past decades. However, as cis-gender same-sex couples cannot reproduce by conventional means, inequalities in reproduction policy and family policy remain an obstacle to their full equality. This paper investigates how regulations of adoption, medically assisted reproduction (MAR) and parental leave are associated with attitudes towards female and male same-sex parents. Conceptually, the study draws on policy feedback theory and gendered care norms. Between-within models are estimated to investigate whether the observed associations are attributable to unobserved longstanding differences between countries or to actual policy change. The 2012 and 2022 ISSP waves of the “Family and Changing Gender Roles” module are merged with the ILGA World Database, the International Reproduction Policy Database and information from the Parental Leave Network. Findings on adoption policy lend support to policy feedback effects. Within countries, decreasing differences in parental leave for male same-sex parents correspond to increased support for this family type. The relationship between MAR regulations and attitudes towards same-sex parenting, in contrast, appears to be driven by underlying cross-national differences. Furthermore, across all policy types, the association between policies and attitudes is stronger for male than for female same-sex parents.
This article engages with the concept of resilience, inquiring about its main features and developing its application to social policy and the welfare state. The article is organised around three main tasks: identifying the main elements of the concept, reviewing how it has been used in social policy scholarship, applying it to welfare state analysis. The particularity of resilience is its focus on the imperative to respond to shock and disturbance and this sets it apart from other concepts such as social investment. A resilience perspective most readily envisages three possible social policy functions: withstanding shock and risk, improving responsiveness and coping ability, enhancing preparedness for shocks and risks. Resilience is useful in envisaging a set of social policy function but the analysis cautions that, if we are to use the concept for social policy purposes, we need to do so with care. In particular, the concept's relative lack of attention to structural factors, its over-emphasis on agency and process and its functionalist orientation to change limit its usefulness as a framework for understanding social policy and its reform.
Social investment is not expected to create strong positive feedback effects. While social protection is defended from conservative retrenchment by constituencies of beneficiaries whose income depends on policy continuity, social investment facilitates labour market earnings, weakening incentives to organise once its benefits are realised. This article contributes to the debate arguing that social investment can generate positive but different feedback effects by fostering a supportive public opinion and attracting employers and experts interested in economic growth, thereby fostering their continuity. The argument is tested through work-family policy, a key field of social investment, using an original database of 655 policy changes in childcare, leave, benefits, and family- and gender-related labour-market and pension regulation across six conservative welfare states over a forty-year period. Methodologically, the article introduces a new way to measure policy feedback through the cumulative direction of policy reforms, differentiating here between dual-earner and male-breadwinner trajectories. Interacting this measure with cabinet ideology shows that right-wing cabinets are more likely to adopt male-breadwinner reforms only in conservative institutional contexts. As dual-earner reforms accumulate, partisan differences fade and eventually disappear. This adapts policy feedback theory to social investment and suggests how the institutionalisation of gender economic rights can prevent conservative backlash.
In an era marked by social inequalities, political polarisation and economic and geopolitical instability, knowledge of citizens' perceptions of and preferences for welfare and environmental policy, and of how these interact, is essential for assessing the political scope for eco-social policy development. Based on data from the Norwegian Monitor Survey, the article studies citizens' attitudes towards welfare and environmental policies in Norway, focusing on changes in support over the period 2003–2023. The share of respondents expressing simultaneous support for welfare and environmental policies has increased, suggesting an increasing alignment of social and environmental policy attitudes among the Norwegian public. This indicates a widened scope for parallel policy efforts across the two domains and ample potential for eco-social policy development in Norway. The study confirms a socioeconomic divide in environmental and welfare preferences. However, tracking attitudes over time, we find growing support for environmental policies among the financially insecure over the study period. This points towards a weakening socioeconomic divide in Norway and a convergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups. Another key finding relates to political trust, which emerged as an increasingly important explanatory factor.
Minimum income schemes are among the most controversial social policy programmes. Besides debates about their effectiveness to alleviate poverty and the costs associated with them, social legitimacy and stigma associated with benefit receipt are important issues, which contribute to high rates of non-take-up. Despite growing political and academic interest, there is limited understanding of how specific policy design features affect social legitimacy and take-up behaviour. This article investigates the impact of key design features of minimum income schemes on perceptions of fairness and intentions to claim benefits. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from distributive justice, utility arguments, and the literature on administrative burden, we conducted a factorial survey experiment in Germany. Survey respondents of the labour force were presented with scenarios describing a minimum income scheme that varied in the following dimensions: eligibility criteria, benefit level, workfare activation and enabling activation. Our findings reveal that means testing, behavioural requirements, and subsidised training significantly increase perceived fairness, with behavioural requirements being the most critical factor. Behavioural requirements are particularly important for perceived fairness when benefits are generous. Conversely, moderate behavioural requirements, higher benefit levels, and opportunities for subsidised training enhance take-up intentions. We interpret these results as reflecting the principle of need and the social norm of reciprocity, which shape perceptions of fairness, alongside utility arguments that influence take-up intentions. Notably, we find little evidence that perceptions of administrative burden reduce take-up intentions in our scenarios, except in the case of very harsh behavioural requirements. Overall, the design features of our factorial survey have a similar influence on perceptions of fairness and take-up intentions (although to a different extent), suggesting a partly interrelated relationship between these phenomena.
