Abstract Childhood obesity rates are rising sharply worldwide, creating urgent questions: does the public support government involvement? And do people see obesity as a structural or individual problem? These questions matter for the legitimacy and effectiveness of public policy. Research on comparative public attitudes remains limited. This study addresses that gap. We analyse representative survey data from forty Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including 39,746 respondents. Childhood obesity carries serious consequences for health, education, employment and life expectancy. Parental choices shape children’s diets and activity levels, yet government involvement remains contested, balancing policy goals against personal freedom. At the structural level, a powerful food industry drives rising obesity rates. An experimental vignette design tests the causal effect of the level of risk to a child on public support for government involvement. We also examine links between support, trust and political values and how childhood obesity is framed. A clear majority supports government involvement, consistent with child rights regulations. The level of risk to a child causally increases support. Trust and preferences for values of care and order correlate positively with support. Most respondents frame obesity as a health issue. Few identify it as a structural issue; a finding with significant implications for policy effectiveness.
A central principle of basic income (BI) is unconditionality, contrasting with the prevailing trend in developed welfare systems that emphasises conditionality based on 'activation'. While literature exists on attitudes about benefit conditionality and various BI solutions, there is limited understanding of the reasoning by individuals who have experienced a shift from conditionality to unconditionality within a BI framework. This gap highlights the need for more research on individual experiences related to these changing benefit principles. Utilising eighty-one in-depth participant interviews from the Finnish BI experiment targeting the long-term unemployed, we asked: how do experiment participants view benefit (un)conditionality after having received an unconditional basic income? Our results on the views of benefit conditionality among BI recipients proved to be quite varied. Some of the interviewees strongly supported principles of unconditionality, some basing their views on personal experience, while others opposed unconditionality, referring to their political beliefs, associating universal BI with leftist ideas, despite the Finnish experiment having been initiated by a conservative government. Interviews indicate that institutionalised norms and personal ideologies - key factors in welfare state research - significantly influence reasoning on (un)conditionality among participants in BI experiments, reflecting the work ethos of both traditional and current Nordic welfare state models.
Advanced welfare states have come to consider housing displacement and eviction among their most pressing policy concerns; this is especially true since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, state governments have enacted new protections for renters with the aim of protecting rental markets from destabilisation and reducing displacement. This article provides a qualitative legislative analysis of Maryland's eviction-related legislation passed from 2020 to 2024, using more than twenty-five legislative documents, hearing transcripts and stakeholder testimonies to conduct the analysis. In doing so, we employed racial capitalism and slow violence as analytical frameworks to explore how legislation that is technically race-neutral may recreate ongoing structural inequities, specifically for Black women and low-income renters. The analysis shows that although legislative measures in Maryland, such as HB 18 and HB 200, improve procedural protections, they fail to disrupt ongoing dynamics of racialised housing precarity. This analysis contends that procedural justice alone, without material redistribution or enforcement, does not necessarily change the racial inequalities we seek to address but instead runs the risk of reproducing them. This paper illustrates the implications of technocratic eviction laws and distinguishes the significance of differentiating between procedural reform and structural change in housing policies.
Abstract How society views the welfare deservingness of migrants significantly impacts their welfare rights. However, little attention has been paid to the welfare deservingness of domestic migrants in developing countries. Drawing on the theory of deservingness criteria, this study constructs an analytical framework for the welfare deservingness of rural-to-urban migrants in China based on five key factors: hukou status, length of urban residence, employment status, migration patterns, and homeownership. This study constructed thirty-two vignettes based on the above five factors, collected a set of experimental data through an online survey and used multilevel modelling to analyse factors affecting the perceived welfare deservingness of rural-to-urban migrants. The results show that hukou status is the most significant factor affecting the perceived welfare deservingness of rural-to-urban migrants. In addition, there are significant differences between locals and non-locals in the views on welfare deservingness of rural-to-urban migrants in terms of identity, need and attitude, but not in reciprocity and control. Moreover, the five deservingness criteria have no significant differences in their impact on the different dimensions of welfare deservingness. This study contributes to the understanding of the social underpinnings of the welfare system in China.
Abstract This paper examines how senior executives at the UK’s largest publicly listed companies financially benefited from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), and seeks to explain this phenomenon with the concept of elite welfare . Using a difference-in-differences research design, we analyse the impact of participation in the CJRS on executive remuneration between 2019 and 2023. Drawing on a sample of Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 350 firms ( n = 246), we find that receipt of furlough support in 2020 was associated with significant increases in chief executive officer (CEO) performance pay and total remuneration in the immediate post-pandemic year. We interpret these results through a new analytical approach that understands elite income derived from rent-extraction facilitated by public policy or expenditure as a form of welfare. Unlike conventional welfare, which typically comprises relatively modest payments and concessions to broad sections of the population, elite welfare accrues to a small minority in privileged positions, taking the form of extractions of rent arising through opportunities created by government policy. We argue that recognising elite welfare as a parallel welfare system – largely insulated from competitive constraint and market discipline – provides a valuable new perspective on the interdependencies between inequality, public policy and the redistributive logics of the modern state.
