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In the first part of the chapter, views are discussed on the changing arrangements for social protection that have occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century in many, if not all, of the industrialized nations. Some see these changes as a marginal adjustment in the borders of the welfare state, while others perceive the changing landscape of industrialized welfare states as the embodiment of major revisions in the principles and philosophy of social protection. Most welfare state analysts acknowledge that the reforms are spurred by the need for greater labour force adaptability and productivity in a global economy, by concerns on the erosion of individual responsibility, and by new institutional arrangements for social protection involving market competition. The last part of the chapter addresses the two main theories on how welfare states evolve – convergence under the pressures of broad impersonal structural forces, or divergence into distinct regimes responding to human interventions shaped by socio‐political factors.

This chapter examines an effect of pension reform that was largely unanticipated, or at least seldom explicitly considered, when many pension reforms were being adopted throughout Latin America: the effects of privatization on women's welfare. First, it provides a brief overview of the sources of gender inequalities and discusses elements of pension policy affecting gendered welfare. Second, it explains and critiques the insurance-based criteria for evaluating the gender effects of pension reform. Third, it offers an alternative set of criteria for evaluating gender outcomes based on three dimensions: women's ability to claim social citizenship rights, gender stratification, and the distribution of welfare responsibility among the market, state, and family. Finally, it compares interpretations of the gendered effects of pension reform in Latin America based on insurance and distributive assumptions to illustrate why disagreements in the literature persist.

How can we explain policy similarities and differences across time, jurisdiction, and country? Examples are offered in a comparison of social and economic context, the role of institutions, ideology, democratic type, industrialization, and social change as they account for two political outcomes: welfare policy and party election programs. Key methodological and theoretical issues are raised, relating to the empirical demands of causality and contingency. ‘How politics matters’ is ultimately left unanswered because of methodological indeterminacies, though three findings remain: policies are not made in a socio‐economic vacuum, institutional effects are still an open question, and policy conditions are attributable to partisan conditions.

This introductory chapter begins with a description of the goal of the book, which is to understand efforts over the past few decades to establish and maintain standards of animal welfare for animals, in pursuit of improved lives for future animals. Social theory and animal welfare science, and current trends in laboratory animal welfare policy are discussed.

This chapter examines how the interaction between government partisanship and corporatism affects social policy in Spain, the Netherlands, and the UK. It is shown that in a noncorporatist country such as Spain, the policies of the PSOE governments lacked a clear social dimension. ALMPs were considered secondary to other political objectives (such as inflation reduction or labour market flexibilization). In the Netherlands, corporatism promoted much higher levels of social policy, but, as in Spain, the influence of government partisanship was not obvious. The UK case shows that before the 1980s, both parties had engaged in expansive welfare measures. The electoral victory of Margaret Thatcher signaled the beginning of a period in which governments of both parties would limit social policy. It is shown that the Conservative governments of Thatcher and Major pursued policies directed to the retrenchment of the welfare state.

This chapter begins with an overview of the rationale behind this book. It goes on to discuss the intellectual and policy debates that form the context within which the studies in the book were developed, and then highlights the specific contributions of these studies. It explains the links between unemployment and marginalisation, policy interventions to reduce the risks of marginalisation, and the failure of policies to provide labour market protection for the most vulnerable.

This essay argues that economists have ignored a crucial dimension of poverty: its intrinsically dynamic characteristic of being locked into a low-level trap of asset (or capability) deprivation, resulting in exclusion from social and economic life on a par with the rest of society. Long-term poverty is fundamentally self-perpetuating. Hence, poverty alleviation in the long run must address incentives for the poor to acquire capabilities and assets that will enable them (or their children) to escape poverty in the future. In the Mirrlees model, for instance, the income-earning capability of every household is exogenously given, hence the root causes of current poverty are not addressed. A dynamic extension of this framework would be needed to include investment decisions by households, which would affect the evolution of their future abilities. Such a framework more directly addresses some of the general public concerns concerning the tendency of comprehensive welfare systems to breed long-term dependence. At the same time, the argument for superiority of cash over in-kind transfers ceases to be valid, even within the conventional utilitarian framework where consumer “rationality” is not questioned.

This chapter examines the advocacy efforts of members of Congress for policies designed to help poor people. It investigates whether the differences that exist between black, Latino, and white legislators in racial and ethnic hearings also occur in social welfare hearings. It examine legislators' interventions in committee deliberations during part of the Clinton era (1993–1997) and the first term of the George W. Bush presidency (2001–2003). It focuses on how actively legislators engaged in the deliberations in terms of questioning witnesses and interacting with fellow members of Congress. It also examines other legislative interventions, such as testifying at hearings in favor of social welfare policies that benefit the poor and requesting hearings designed to help poor people, who are disproportionately minorities.

This chapter examines the interplay of expertise and advocacy in animal welfare policy-making: does expertise lead automatically to advocacy? Does advocacy require expertise? Should there be a special advocacy or accountability role for veterinarians that goes beyond doctoring the animals? As veterinarians, protectionists, and research advocates debated these questions with the USDA regulations writers, the animals themselves and controversial questions of who knew what was best for them were often lost in the cross fire.

This chapter considers the future of results-oriented accountability (ROA) and the use of empirical evidence to guide and improve child welfare policy. It assesses where current child welfare policy stands on each of the five dimensions of ROA outlined in Chapter 1. It considers the alternative directions that ROA might take in child welfare with respect to the accountability mismatch between the enlarged scope of public interest and the limited technical capacity of states to meet rigorous standards of evidence. The chapter offers some thoughts about the future of waivers and the flexible funding of child welfare interventions, the continued viability of market-oriented solutions to the principal-agent/principal-agent problem, and the role of university-agency partnerships in fostering accountability in child welfare.

The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA) specified the accountability concerns for public child welfare and codified the outcomes for children served in these systems as safety, permanence, and wellbeing. The drive to define, measure, report, and manage these results has dominated the field for many years, even prior to the passage of ASFA. However, some people suggest that the outcome movement has so skewed attention to results that the practices which produce them have been lost. This chapter outlines an approach toward assessing the external validity of child welfare practices through research reviews of empirically-supported practices and policies across variations in populations, settings, interventions, and outcomes.

This chapter uses data from two ongoing studies in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, to provide empirical evidence supporting the claim that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. It begins with a history of the separation of income maintenance from social services, then briefly describes the current situation. It is shown that workfare and child welfare programs serve increasingly similar populations with similar needs. However, despite the similar needs of these populations, indeed, even a large overlap between the populations, these two systems continue to operate largely independently, if not at cross-purposes. These findings call into question both the structure of service systems in jurisdictions like Milwaukee and the federal welfare and child welfare policies that lead state and local policy makers to create such misaligned systems.

This chapter considers the arguments behind the expansion in welfare-to-work programmes that occurred over the last decade, and reviews the effectiveness of alternative approaches to enhancing labour-market attachment and earnings among the low skilled. It concerns the ‘iron triangle’ of welfare reform — that is the three, often conflicting, goals: raising the living standards of those on low incomes; encouraging work and economic self-sufficiency; and keeping government costs low. Section 2 considers the labour-market trends that stimulated the New Deal and Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) reforms in the UK. Section 3 considers a number of central design features, focusing on time limits, means testing and implicit tax rates, minimum hours requirements, welfare receipt eligibility, and wage progression. This is done in the context of the design of the New Deal and of the WFTC. Section 4 moves on to evaluate specific aspects of the New Deal and WFTC reforms. Section 5 concludes with an overview of these schemes and their effectiveness, and an assessment of the appropriate design of welfare-to-work and make-work-pay programmes.

This chapter examines the relevance and irrelevance of research on public child welfare, focusing on issues such as child removal, family preservation, and child protection. This is done against the background of the four levels of the child welfare system: its programs and services; the structure of the child welfare system itself; child welfare policies; and cognitive and emotional factors such as conceptions of justice. The fundamental discrepancy between research and practice is explored: the focus of child welfare practice on individual child and family, and the emphasis of most social science research on aggregate data.