International Journal of Social Welfare最新文献

Social care is a pressing policy issue in the UK, where it is widely acknowledged that the status quo—including who pays, profits, and receives/delivers care—is unsustainable. Yet we know relatively little about the factors shaping satisfaction with the current system, as most prior research has been either descriptive in nature or focused on assessing funding priorities. This study investigates determinants of social care satisfaction for the UK general population, paying particular attention to the potentially interactive effect of age and ideology. Using 2012–2019 BSA Survey data, we find that middle-aged respondents are particularly dissatisfied with social care, but that ideology complicates this dynamic: while conservatives were broadly more satisfied with social care than progressives, this ideology effect disappears among older respondents. This result is largely driven by a modest increase in satisfaction among older progressives—though satisfaction remains low even among comparatively more satisfied groups.

This article analyses the impact of the volunteer guardian role, as stipulated in Italy's Law no. 47/2017, on the reception of unaccompanied minors. The research, spanning 50 months from March 2018 to May 2019, focused on the metropolitan area of Rome. A combination of methodological tools, including participant observation, questionnaires, qualitative interviews, and focus groups, was employed to ensure comprehensive data collection. The research findings delineate the responsibilities of volunteer guardians, encompassing legal representation, educational support, and networking within the established system. Furthermore, the results integrate the perspectives of social workers and minors regarding the guardian's evolving role and elucidate the nature of relationships formed between these stakeholders. The involvement of multiple decision-makers in the child's life, including voluntary guardians, social workers, foster care professionals, and juvenile judges, results in a diverse allocation of responsibilities and roles. These are continuously negotiated as part of a shared responsibility with a variable geometry.

This study employs the two-stage difference-in-differences (2sDiD) estimator to investigate the causal effect of economic sanctions on political stability. It contributes to existing research by (1) re-evaluating sanctions' impacts on political stability using newly introduced causal inference methods, and (2) distinguishing the effects of sanctions across various political regimes and economic globalisation levels. The article argues that economic sanctions create economic hardships for the target population, leading to public frustration toward their governments, which stimulates political mobilisation and thereby decreases the country's political stability. However, sanctions hurt democracies more than autocracies because autocratic regimes can suppress public dissent through repression and citizens face higher costs for opposition. Moreover, economic globalisation offers targets alternatives to sanctioned products and services, potentially weakening sanctions thus damaging political stability more in low-globalised than in high-globalised countries. Empirical findings from 9230 country-year observations between 1949 and 2022 largely align with the theoretical predictions, showing that economic sanctions undermine the target's political stability, with these destabilising effects contingent upon its political regime and economic globalisation levels.

The growth of non-standard employment has emerged as a crucial factor that contributes to delays and difficulties in young people's transitions to adulthood. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of multidimensional measures of precariousness. This paper aims to investigate the phenomenon of precariousness holistically, using an original database of respondents in Spain from 20 to 34 years of age. Using a mixed-methods approach, we explore young people's understandings of precariousness and examine its key determinants and consequences. The findings illustrate the multidimensional nature of feelings of precariousness, with economic insecurity and work conditions being core elements. Our results point to precarity stemming from a combination of inextricably intertwined objective and subjective components, as well as work and economic dimensions.

The recent literature on platform work and the welfare state has stressed that, despite being affected by high-income insecurity, platform workers cannot easily access social protection. However, it is unclear why platform workers encounter such barriers. This article offers an inductive and empirically based theoretical framework to investigate the obstacles faced by platform workers. It shows that the barriers experienced by platform workers depend on the eligibility criteria, the assessment criteria and the trade-off between taxation and social protection. The article substantiates these claims by offering both a policy analysis of formal arrangements and a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of welfare of 101 platform workers in Italy, Sweden and the UK during COVID-19. The research found that, while many platform workers attempted to access social protection during COVID-19, platform workers' access to social protection was affected by their positionality as outsiders, which clashes with the eligibility criteria (in Sweden and Italy); by the irregular nature of platform work, which contrasts with the rigidity of the assessment criteria (in the UK, Italy and Sweden); and by the implicit trade-off experienced by platform workers between minimising taxation and accessing to social protection (in the UK and Italy).

Legislation governs both the admittance and treatment of forced migrants in the United States. Increasingly, many forced migrants are offered few welfare benefits, temporary protection, and no pathway to permanent residency. This paper explores forced migrants' legal categories and access to social welfare, focusing on five humanitarian protection statuses: Temporary Protected Status, Humanitarian Parole, Asylum Seeker, Refugee, and Asylee. Based on the concepts of welfare nationalism and the Protestant Work Ethic, our historical analysis examines the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 to see how this landmark legislation shaped access to welfare for noncitizens. We then focus on the emergence of humanitarian statuses since the 1950s and the legislation that constructed them. We conclude that immigration legislation governing forced migrants underlies an ideology of deserving, where some are treated as more meritorious than others. Thus, we call for welfare scholars to elevate immigration status as a key category in their research.

Caring for a disabled child involves both indirect and direct economic costs, which in turn may create a financial burden for the family. Using Norway as a case, we examine if public compensatory measures reach those most in need, by assessing whether socioeconomic disadvantages and immigrant background impact adversely on the uptake of a nationally available cash benefits eligible for parents caring for a child with a disability. We take advantage of national administrative register data on children with a selection of well-defined diagnoses born between 2009 and 2017 (N = 14,469). Our results show nonnegligible, but relatively minor, social inequalities in the uptake of cash benefits related to socioeconomic and immigrant background. Our findings indicate that this state's financial support seems to reach those most in need. However, it is essential to deepen our understanding of how socioeconomic and immigrant backgrounds influence access to and utilization of municipal healthcare services. Notably, the application process for these services often involves a greater degree of discretion on the part of welfare professionals. Further research is needed to illuminate the nuanced dynamics of these factors in the context of accessing healthcare services at the local level.

Non-standard employment (NSE) might offer employment opportunities for unemployed workers, who would not find a job otherwise and can improve their human capital while working in NSE instead of being unemployed. NSE thus could serve as a bridge to regular, permanent employment. However, these stepping stone effects might not occur in a segmented labour market, when the accumulated human capital is not useful for regular jobs or NSE is not a positive signal to potential employers. Using German administrative data and sequence and cluster analysis, this article examined the labour market trajectories of initially unemployed individuals between 2012 and 2015 over a 4-year period with a focus on four common forms of NSE. The results indicate that NSE is not limited to marginal groups but 62% of the initially unemployed belong to a cluster with a substantial share of NSE. Furthermore, while most individuals stay in NSE, some regular full-time employment occurs after NSE.

This paper investigates the association between informal employment as a form of non-standard employment and the prevalence of in-work poverty for women in the health sector. We measured in-work poverty using a binary indicator that provides information on whether an individual has earnings above or below the low earnings threshold. The indicator takes into account household size and whether other household members are also in paid work. Using data from the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey for the years 2012 and 2018 and logit models, we found that being employed within the health sector increased the likelihood of in-work poverty among non-standard employees, both men and women. However, higher risks of in-work poverty were witnessed among women working informally in the health sector compared to other sectors. This increased risk was particularly observed when comparing non-standard employment in the health sector to non-standard employment in non-health sectors. Furthermore, marital status plays a critical role in economic wellbeing, with never-married women being more susceptible to in-work poverty compared to ever-married women.