Employment-centered family policies enable parents to combine work and family, thereby improving work–life balance for individuals and families as well as increasing GDP. For these reasons, these policies constitute a central component of the social investment approach, a model for how to design social policies for contemporary societies. This study seeks to understand whether voters enable the expansion of these policies and therein promote social investment. The literature suggests that voters may reward governments that expand such policies for reducing work–life tensions at a relatively low cost. Yet support may wane if voters oppose mothers’ employment or face few opportunities to take up such policies (e.g., due to barriers to labor market entry). Left parties are found to gain from expanding day care but lose votes for expanding leave schemes, a finding which partially explains the vote losses for leave expansion before the activation turn. Generous day care and leave schemes in the social democratic regime entail an electoral logic, whereby governments escape vote losses for the expansion of leave schemes and gain from expanding day care. The remaining results do not reach statistical significance and should be interpreted with care.

Human capital investments are at the core of the SIA. In the knowledge-based service economy, the SIA is a promising model for how to ensure economic growth and social cohesion simultaneously through investments in human capital. Yet investing in human capital raises challenges that require attention towards how people accumulate skills and retain these over time. Due to particular features of human capital, this chapter argues, a comprehensive approach is needed that both incentivizes skill acquisition over the life course and protects acquired skills via policies that facilitate labour-market transitions, thus enabling reintegration into the labour market. The discussion elaborates on ways in which social investment policies are complementary to each other, with particular attention to how policies that invest in skills complement policies that protect these skill investments. Evidence for such institutional complementarities is assessed through descriptive statistics and a vignette analysis of the Swedish case.

.................................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... ii List of figures ......................................................................................................................................... v Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................................... vi

This chapter aims to understand the viability of the SIA in Latin America by focusing on the extent to which conditional cash transfers (CCTs) fulfil the stock, flow, and buffer functions of social investment. Despite evidence that CCTs make important social investment contributions, our analysis shows that they are inadequately supported by policies impacting before (e.g. early childhood education and care (ECEC), and preschool), during (e.g. educational reforms to increase quality of teaching and learning), and after educational trajectories (e.g. labour-market policies). This points to the vast importance of policy context in planning, designing, and implementing social investments. Programmes like CCTs have, to date, been implemented on the margins of existing welfare and social policy systems, and gaps could be addressed in the short and medium term through a comprehensive SIA that ideally pursues three interrelated objectives.

Despite the popularity of social investment, there remain ambiguities regarding how to design an effective social investment approach. We review evaluations of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in Latin America in order to draw out lessons of how to improve the effectiveness of social investment. CCTs share many of the objectives of the social investment approach and are targeted at poorer groups. Since research shows that such groups are often not adequately supported through social investment policies, analyzing CCTs holds particular promise. Our analysis finds that architects of social investment policies should consider three questions when designing a social investment approach: how much investment is necessary to fulfill social investment functions, what is the causal mechanism through which the goals of social investment are to be achieved, and what array of policies are necessary for such mechanisms to be effective?

The Nigerian jihadist-terrorist movement Boko Haram reached international notoriety especially after the bombing of an UN-headquarters in Abuja in 2011 and after the kidnappings of 276 schoolgirls in 2014. But these events are minor parts of rapid evolutionary ideological developments and expansion. In 2009 Boko Haram ́s leader, Mohammad Yusuf, was killed by Nigerian forces and the movement was considered defeated. But it resurfaced under the leadership of Abubakar Shekau and rapid transnational expansion followed, along significant medial presence through Shekau ́s published sermons, exhortations and threats against western and domestic leaders. These internet-published messages reach world-wide audiences and constitute platforms for dissemination and constructions of jihadist-ideology. This thesis studies the construction and intermediation of jihadist-ideology by Shekau, through his video-messages. Shekau is investigated through TCP-theory, regarding him as a charismatic leader who in that capacity constructs jihadist-ideology, and develops it in relation to specific contextual crisis-points. The thesis shows that Shekau constructs jihadistideological themes of apostate Muslim and Christian oppression and persecution in collaboration with the West. Two main lines of thought constructed are that the ideology of secular democracy is furthered by these actors in order to dominate and persecute Muslims world-wide, and that jihadists are victims instead of terrorists.

This study aims to theorize more concretely the micro-foundations of reform strategies with attention to the role of would-be reform winners in motivating strategy choice. The theory incorporates insights about multidimensional preferences into Weaver's framework and builds on a growing literature on the framing of welfare state change in order to hypothesize that governments may face a vote-seeking incentive to justify retrenchment by appealing to aspects of the reform that their voters support. Recognizing the political relevance of a pro-retrenchment constituency sheds light on unappreciated political dynamics of welfare state retreat. Illustrative case studies of France and Germany provide insights into the relationship between voter preferences and the political strategies.

be, at the heart of the social policy development have, as a consequence of political tradition, history and language, been used in very different ways. In France, for example, the emphasis on ‘state’ is, and continues to be, detested. In Germany, by contrast, concepts that harmonise the potential antagonism between society and state have been dominant in social policy discourse. And in Nordic countries, the two terms have not quite been intelligibly separable. Not only the different meanings behind shared concepts but also the variety of second-order concepts tied to them is striking. Consider, for example, the relevance of the concept of ‘solidarity’ in France, or ‘caring’ in the Netherlands. In addition, the study illustrates the transnational diffusion of concepts, from the spread of Bismarck’s ‘social insurance’ to the mushrooming of Dutch/Danish ‘flexicurity’. All this reflects how contextually laden the concepts used in comparative welfare state research are, which supports the introductory chapter’s claim that reflexive, comparative and historically informed discussion is a necessary starting point for research and teaching in the field. It should be noted that the book could have benefited from an additional chapter on the methods of conceptual research in social policy. This would have provided the substantive chapters with a useful framing, for although most chapters are historical overviews, they do employ somewhat different approaches to the study of concepts. The chapter on Britain does, for example, have a much stronger intellectual history bent than any of the other chapters, while some basic frequencies are included in the chapter on Japan. Indeed, the volume’s focus on the analysis of concepts suggests a greater focus on methodology. Absent a standalone chapter on methods, one could have wished for a gathered, and more thorough, discussion of the methodological perspective, or perspectives, behind the book as a whole. Such reflections are only loosely scattered throughout the book. One might wonder, for example, what the methodological implications of combining historical approaches with causation-oriented social science, which the introductory chapter advocates, are. On the whole, though, this is a rich and useful volume for anyone interested in comparative social policy, and especially for those concerned with the role of ideas in the history and politics of social policy.

This article describes factors influencing investments in skills training as well as related outcomes in terms of participation rates and benefits on an individual and societal level. Market mechanisms largely drive human capital investments. According to this logic, workers and employers conduct a cost–benefit analysis, weighing expected payoffs against expected costs and investing accordingly. At the same time, market failures and collective action problems may occur in the provision of training. Various policies and institutions have been shown to resolve such problems and boost training. Whereas participation rates vary widely by firm characteristics, high rates of participation help countries specialize in high-quality production and achieve high job satisfaction.

Since the mid-1990s European welfare states have undergone a major transformation. Relative to the post-war years, today they put less emphasis on income protection and more on the promotion of labour market participation. This book investigates this transformation by focusing on two fields of social policy: active labour market policy and childcare. Throughout Europe, governments have invested massively in these two areas. The result, a more active welfare state, seems a rather solid achievement, likely to survive the turbulent post-crisis years. Why? Case studies of policy trajectories in seven European countries and advanced statistical analysis of spending figures suggest that the shift towards an active social policy is only in part a response to a changed economic environment. Political competition, and particularly the extent to which active social policy can be used for credit claiming purposes, help us understand the peculiar cross-national pattern of social policy reorientation. This book, by trying to understand the shift towards an active welfare state, provides also an update of political science theories of social policy making.

A. Franco, N. Malhotra, and G. Simonovits (“Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer,” Reports, 19 September, p. [1502][1]) present convincing evidence of publication bias in the social sciences. Encouraging publication of negative results will indeed benefit the

This paper describes our new dataset on conditionality requirements for unemployment benefit claimants. Even though the past three decades have witnessed extensive efforts in quantifying social rights, conditionality remains relatively unexamined, with only a handful of excellent though incomplete studies assembling comparative data on how states delimit and enforce the job search behavior of the unemployed. We build on these studies with the goal of collecting data for 22 countries between 1980 and 2011. In this paper we explain the relevance of the dataset for the study of welfare state change, discuss measurement issues, and present data for five countries: France, Germany, South Korea, Austria, and the United Kingdom.