Differentiation of welfare regimes: The case of Italy

The different welfare system classifications mainly address systems on the national level, while the local levels have not been considered in any great detail. The welfare reform measures adopted in some countries have led to more autonomy on the local level. Consequently, local authorities have adopted different social policies and developed diverse welfare services. This article addresses the case of Italy and shows that classifying a welfare regime by considering only the national level can lead to important local features being missed that are indeed relevant for its classification. The units of analysis are the 20 administrative regions of Italy. The results demonstrate that the Italian welfare system is far from being a homogeneous system and that the resources available on the local level have a considerable effect on the level of the welfare services provided. These results show that more attention needs to be directed at the local level.     

One new policy: A variety of applications—The implementation processes of a new mental health policy in Sweden

The increase in mental ill health at a global level is widely acknowledged. This trend has led to the development of new policy frameworks that focus on public mental health. This study aimed to explore the implementation process regarding regional and local responses to national policy, proposing a substantially enhanced understanding of mental health within the Swedish welfare system. To explore the implementation process, a multiple case study was conducted using snowball sampling. In all, 18 key informants were interviewed. The results revealed that the informants adopted an experimental implementation process in which policy learning could take place. Contextual factors were essential for how a broad policy approach could be translated into practice. The broad policy not only made it possible for local needs to be addressed, but it also allowed for variations in focus position within the country as a whole. There seemed to be no consensus among the informants as to the origin or solution to the problem. Essentially, the question of whether public mental health issues should be dealt with at a structural or individual level remained unresolved. The Swedish case could be understood as an illustrative example of how one country attempts to handle a major problem despite insufficient information to direct the initiative towards a certain direction.     

Measuring State TANF Policy Variations and Change After Reform*

Objectives. Our objectives are to describe the policies adopted after PRWORA, which vary across states, to test for common underlying policy concepts, demonstrating how these policies are interrelated, and to examine whether policy stringency diffused to neighboring states results in greater policy stringency across all states over time. We convert textual TANF welfare guidelines into empirically derived policy dimensions and use the derived quantitative scores to describe variation and change in welfare policy dimensions across status during the 1996–2003 post‐welfare‐reform period. Methods. Utilizing the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, we apply a factor analytic methodology to 78 unique state policy guidelines that were coded on a lenient‐to‐stringent continuum. Regression analyses, employing spatial contiguity weighting, are used to describe policy diffusion. Results. The results identified 15 underlying first‐order post‐welfare‐reform policy dimensions, which for scientific parsimony were further reduced to three second‐order underlying dimensions representing rules governing eligibility: eligibility requirements for groups, behavioral responsibilities for maintaining eligibility, and eligibility time limits and exemptions. Analysis of the quantitative scores showed that by 2003 states had become more lenient regarding eligibility criteria for groups but decidedly more stringent regarding behavioral guidelines for maintaining eligibility and eligibility time limits and exemptions. Spatial clustering is not found globally but is significant for some states at the local level. Spatial diffusion is apparent only for behavioral rules. Conclusions. Our results suggest that TANF policy variations across states go beyond payment levels to include salient eligibility rules. The patterns of variability in change scores across states do not support a pervasive “race to the bottom” conclusion.     

Regional Welfare System Developments in Russia:Community Social Services

Micro-level studies of welfare service developments are largely absent from the literature on Russian social policy issues, which tends to concentrate on macro-level social security arrangements. This paper highlights the emergence of community-based social services in the post-1991 era, examining their development in two provincial Russian cities, based on an empirical study carried out in 1998. The paper adds to a growing literature which seeks to understand "welfare systems" from the perspective of welfare services as opposed to a social security or policy-based approach. It takes a user-group perspective on the services by looking at their use by, and relevance for, disabled children regarded as having learning difficulties, and their families. The empirical data indicate the shape of "new" services in the field sites, the means by which such institutions were maintained and their integration into the welfare sphere as a whole. Their development and maintenance at the local level is explained in part by socio-economic, political and administrative factors in these regions. By highlighting the various factors that help to maintain welfare provision and drive change at the local level, the case studies indicate the possible shape of future welfare developments in Russia as a whole.     

The social welfare reform during the progressive regimes of South Korea: Theoretical implications

This study assesses the social welfare reform during the progressive regimes of South Korea (hereafter Korea) led by President Kim Dae-Jung (1998-2003) and President Roh Moo-Hyun (2003-2008), and considers its theoretical implications. Analysis of the social welfare reform under the two progressive governments has indicated that the reform did not produce the anticipated results. Although the Korean economy has grown rapidly along with a considerable increase in the national income per capita in comparison with that in the past, the country's social welfare system still remains significantly underdeveloped in all respects, relative to that of all the other OECD countries with similar economic power, let alone the advanced welfare states in Western Europe. This study maintains that the key reason for the inertia or status quo despite the significant efforts of both the governments to expand social welfare is explained in the Korean growth-first doctrine, which inherently considers that distribution hinders growth and that social policy is secondary to economic policy, thus limiting the choices of the country's decision makers, as has been the case all along since the developmental period. Given that the growth-first doctrine inherently regarded the relationship between growth and welfare as mutually exclusive, it was perhaps natural that the influence of the doctrine upon the social welfare policy of both the progressive governments would not be so positive. This suggests that path dependence is active in the case of the Korean social welfare policy, thus substantiating the validity of path-dependence theory.     

The Theory and Practice of Welfare Partnerships: The Case of the Cultural Sector

Partnership working in the welfare state has moved from the margins to the mainstream in terms of achieving policy objectives. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical and empirical developments in the field, this article presents a framework for analyzing welfare partnerships that give precedence to the issues of trust and interdependence. This article presents findings from a study of local authority museum services in Scotland, England and Wales to test this framework. A series of case studies revealed that partnerships have been driven by a number of factors including policy, power, funding and people. Partnerships could gain services credibility, but trust and interdependence were compromised by conflictual and unequal relationships. Partnerships were often short term, lacked ongoing maintenance plans and limited by their type of funding. The article proposes that further analysis of the level of individual agency at ground level be considered when thinking about partnerships in the cultural sector.     

The Local and the National in Community Care: Exploring Policy and Politics in Finland and Britain

International literature on community care tends to focus on the national level of welfare institutions and policies. However, community care is largely a locally tailored service and this paper makes a case for local comparisons of community care policies. Using local case studies from Finland and Britain, the paper argues that focusing on the local level contributes to the comparative study of community care in two ways. First, local comparisons highlight the often distinctively local nature of community care policies and thereby add to our understanding of community care. Second, local comparisons extend existing cross‐country explanations of community care by showing that community care is largely shaped by local politics, together with indirect structuring by national contexts. As such, the local case studies highlight the importance of the relationship between policy and politics, which has often been neglected in comparative research.     

Empowering the People: Public Responses to Welfare Policy Change

How and when does welfare policy contribute to shape public opinion? This article departs from the policy feedback research tradition and seeks to contribute to the understanding of how policy influences public opinion (public responsiveness). The argument here suggests that personal experiences in terms of empowerment condition the dynamics between policy and opinion. The empirical case concerns the implementation of a consumer's choice model in Swedish primary health care, which resulted an intended increase in private health care centres. In this case, empowerment is assumed to be enhanced by increased exit options and freedom of choice. The specific question in the analysis is whether citizens who have empowering experiences, as a consequence of the reform, are more likely to be positive towards further privatization of welfare services. The results show few effects in general, but there seems to be a correlation between the experience of exiting and more positive attitudes towards privatization.     

The Evolution of Welfare Reform: Policy Changes and Current Knowledge

Welfare reform has had dramatic repercussions for millions of adults andchildren in the country. So far, the results of the "naturalexperiment" of welfare reform have shown both benefits and problems. Although welfare reform became law in 1996, there have been legislativerevisions and other policy changes aimed at making the law moreeffective and less punitive. The latest research indicates that welfare reform has had a major impact on the number of people who are receiving welfarebenefits but not on the income of former welfare recipients. Research also suggests that there are families who are suffering as a result of welfare reform. In this article, I discuss how welfare reform has evolved and theimplications for policy changes in the future.     

Activation and Local Welfare in Italy: Trends and Issues

This article deals with the development of local welfare in Italy and is grounded on a research project focusing on activation as a main feature of change in Italian social policies. Along with decentralization processes, many Italian regions have been acting as policy laboratories, developing and testing very different approaches according to their political attitude. On the one hand this results in a fragmented policy landscape which is difficult to recompose, and, moreover, in growing inequalities in the Italian welfare system. On the other hand, it opens opportunities for experimentation on institutional and organizational structures on a regional scale, creating a variety of practices for research and policy analysis. In the article we first describe the main trends in national social policies, with a specific focus on the dynamics of change referring to activation. We will then focus on a pilot programme which is aiming at the promotion and implementation of innovative practices in health and social care services in Friuli‐Venezia Giulia, a region in which there is a significant orientation towards enhancing social citizenship and enforcing the central position of the public actor. We investigate how the dynamics of territorialization and personalization, implied by the programme, trigger specific logics and practices of activation. Finally, referring to this case study, we propose an analytical overview of some relevant issues in the development of ‘local active welfare’ in Italy.     

Lithuania's children's policy in the period of transition

The article investigates the welfare regime of the free Lithuanian Republic from the perspective of children's policy. The main principles of the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child – child protection, child provision and child participation – serve as indicators for the level of child orientation. The article analyses legal and institutional issues related to the implementation of the Convention in Lithuania in the first decade of Independence 1990–2001. Furthermore, it compares Lithuanian policy with the three welfare regimes identified by Esping-Andersen. Our results indicate that Lithuanian policy shows a low level of child orientation and that the Lithuanian welfare regime does not correspond to any of the welfare regimes in Esping-Andersen's typology. Lithuania still shows traits from the former Soviet regime. The new liberal extreme market orientation is not modified by social support institutions, and is combined with conservative ideologies on women and family.     

Welfare reform and future challenges in the Republic of Korea: Beyond the developmental welfare state?

Since the economic crisis of 1997–98, the Republic of Korea has carried out vigorous social policy initiatives including the reform of the National Pension Programme and National Health Insurance. This paper seeks to answer whether the country's welfare state has moved beyond welfare developmentalism, by examining the cases of those two programmes. By the reform, the coverage of the National Pension Programme was extended to the whole population; and its financial sustainability and accountability were enhanced. Regarding National Health Insurance, efficiency reform was carried out on the management structure, while reform regarding financing was put on hold. These reforms were in clear contrast to the welfare developmentalism that used to place overwhelming emphasis on economic considerations. Despite these reforms, however, the Republic of Korea's welfare state faces the issues of ineffectual implementation and lack of financial sustainability of social policy. The National Pension Programme has failed to cover the majority of irregular workers, whose numbers are on the increase, and National Health Insurance needs to find a way to meet increasing health expenditure.     

Exploring Neglected Dimensions of Social Policy: The SDW, Fiscal Welfare and the Exemplar of Local Taxation in England

Titmuss's Social Division of Welfare (SDW) thesis is a vitally important but much neglected element of social policy analysis. This article seeks to explore the SDW, with a particular focus on fiscal welfare. Fiscal welfare has been described as forming a hidden welfare state, and while taxation is one of the main ways in which governments affect the lives of citizens, studies of welfare pay remarkably little attention to its impact. Fiscal welfare is examined by using, as an exemplar, local taxation in England, a subject that itself is neglected within social policy. Local taxation in England is of interest because it illustrates the impact of a system of taxation on different groups of citizens, and how this can operate to the benefit of rich over poor citizens. This is because the current system is highly regressive, meaning that those on low and middle incomes spend proportionately more of their income paying the tax than do those on high incomes. What is of further interest is how within the debate about reform of local taxation, concern with regressivity becomes obscured and ceases to be the focus of attention. We are thus provided with an example of how fiscal welfare remains a hidden issue. The article concludes by arguing that social policy analysis needs to move beyond the narrow confines of social welfare and develop a broader understanding of welfare, based on the SDW.     

Unravelling the Politics of Activation Reforms: Exploring the Unusual Israeli Trajectory

Contemporary active labour market (ALM) reforms are pivotal in the reorganization of the welfare state as they challenge and threaten some of the fundamental achievements of labour in capitalist societies: social programmes and entitlements that compensate for unemployment, and governance arrangements in which the social partners share authority and responsibility with the state. Consequently, ALM reforms may give raise to social unrest and political struggle that involves the state (the main proponent of ALM reforms), trade unions and political parties. These conflicts are important in the politicization of reforms, i.e. raising public awareness of and engagement with controversies of welfare state change. In this article, we use a non‐European perspective to ask more generally how distinct historical institutions create separate ‘politicization trajectories’ of ALM reforms, which in turn produce different policy designs and outcomes. Centring on the case of Israel, in which historically ‘abnormal’ class politics fostered indifference to the reform in both trade unions and political parties, we maintain that the preliminary de‐politicization made it possible for bureaucrats to control the reform, leading to an intra‐state conflict between competing agencies over its design and implementation. The usurpation of the reform by the Ministry of Finance made it conspicuously unbalanced, provoking many grievances. Paradoxically, the de‐politicization of the reform advanced its re‐politicization, led by non‐governmental advocacy organizations in civil society. These uncommon political actors in the politics of ALM reforms were able to lead a counter‐coalition, delegitimize the reform, and mobilize politicians to eventually terminate activation     

Change and Resilience in Welfare State Policy. The Politics of Sickness Insurance in Norway and Sweden

This article compares the processes of reforming sickness insurance in Norway and Sweden. Despite the many similarities between the Norwegian and Swedish welfare states, they have taken different paths when it comes to reforming their sickness insurance systems. In the period between 1990 and 2010 Sweden changed its wage replacement levels and levels of employer financing several times, while in Norway they remain basically unchanged since 1978, notwithstanding many reform initiatives by political authorities. Why have the two cases evolved so differently? We address this question by using Peter Starke's review of the retrenchment literature which outlines four major strands of theorizing the politics of welfare reform: neo‐functionalism, conflict theories, institutionalist theories and discourse theory. Rather than treating these as providing competing explanations, the article suggests that elements from all perspectives bring insights to the case. The need for policy reform must always be communicated in a way that can be understood and approved in order to materialize as actual policy change. But discursive change and apparently seductive frames will not always be enough. This comparative analysis illustrates that the chance of success for new frames or discourses depends on the institutional, political and functional context into which they are inserted. Similar attempts at framing the need for reform and cutbacks have had different effects in the two countries depending on the character of the counter forces and extant frames reformers are up against. On the other hand, over time discourses and frames also shape institutions and political relations.     

论社会工作介入社会福利政策的必要性与方式

在我国民政福利体系的改革过程中,最引人注目的是低保制度的出台。低保制度实施过程中所出现的新情况和新问题使专业社会工作的介入成为必要。通过倾听弱势群体的声音,反映弱势群体的政策诉求;参与低保制度的实施过程,作政策与政策对象的调解人;对社会政策的实施进行跟踪调研,提出政策的修订建议;以及专业助人行动,协助低保对象实现自助,社会工作将发挥其他专业不可替代的作用。     

German family policy at the crossroads: analysing the impact of parental leave reform through simulation

Comparative studies of welfare reforms encounter two problems. First, the counterfactual problem is that in the real world schemes and their reforms do not coexist simultaneously and are hard to compare. Second, the contextual problem derives from the absence of comparable measures for change. Microsimulation helps to overcome these problems. It compares policy options – actual reforms or reform plans – simultaneously and provides a comparable measure: the disposable income of model families. This article uses a type–case approach to investigate recent reforms of the German parental leave benefit. Simulation makes those reforms comparable over time and across countries. Results show that the profile of the German scheme is changing from 'general family' towards 'dual-earner' support. Furthermore, the recent reforms make the German scheme converge towards the Swedish leave scheme. The recent reforms introduce a new concept of fairness and a focus on gender equality to German family policies.     

Welfare regime change – or lack of change – in unemployment compensation

Drawing on theoretical accounts of institutional change, this study explored the politics of welfare regime transformation in regard to Turkey's unemployment compensation system. By using the institutionalist approach, the study shows that the process of welfare regime change was one of “institutional layering” of unemployment insurance (UI) over severance pay. Also, the study demonstrates that the economic bureaucracy played a key role in pushing the establishment of UI (state‐centric approach) in contrast to the class‐based organizations that focused their struggles on the severance pay scheme (power‐resource perspective). However, the economic bureaucracy preferred a rudimentary UI design, which prevented UI from undermining the vested interests behind the severance pay scheme. Furthermore, subsequent attempts at the reformation of the severance pay scheme were not successful because the social welfare bureaucracy lacked the capacity to develop a policy alternative to resolve the stalemate between the societal actors. Lastly, the study used the successful severance pay reform experiences of South Korea and Austria to locate the Turkish case within a broader comparative framework.     

German family policy at the crossroads: analysing the impact of parental leave reform through simulation

Comparative studies of welfare reforms encounter two problems. First, the counterfactual problem is that in the real world schemes and their reforms do not coexist simultaneously and are hard to compare. Second, the contextual problem derives from the absence of comparable measures for change. Microsimulation helps to overcome these problems. It compares policy options – actual reforms or reform plans – simultaneously and provides a comparable measure: the disposable income of model families. This article uses a type–case approach to investigate recent reforms of the German parental leave benefit. Simulation makes those reforms comparable over time and across countries. Results show that the profile of the German scheme is changing from 'general family' towards 'dual-earner' support. Furthermore, the recent reforms make the German scheme converge towards the Swedish leave scheme. The recent reforms introduce a new concept of fairness and a focus on gender equality to German family policies.