Inequality, welfare and punishment. Comparative notes between the Global North and South

In this paper, I will describe how two strong connections between, on the one hand, income inequality and welfare generosity, and, on the other, punitiveness, have been built in both theoretical and empirical explorations in the contemporary comparative literature on the sociology of punishment. Then, I will point out the strong concentration of these explorations on national cases from the Global North as a potential limitation. From there, I will try to ‘southernize’ this debate, through three empirical exercises related to a region of the Global South, Latin America. First, I will include this region in a global comparison of clusters of countries to define whether there is an association between the levels of income inequality and welfare generosity and the levels of punitiveness, both now and in the recent past. Second, I will analyse if the same relationships exist within Latin America countries, both now and in the recent past. Finally, I will examine whether these same relationships are relevant for understanding the evolution of the levels of punitiveness in Latin America over the last three decades. Based on the results of these three exercises, I will examine the shortcomings stemming from assuming these strong statements as universal, placeless and timeless, warning that the styles of comparison that have generated them have to be taken as starting points rather than as arrival points of the analysis and stressing that our analyses about contemporary penal differences, while taking macroscopic dimensions into account, should give a strong centrality to the ‘proximate’ processes that mould penal actions and results.

Crisis Management, Policy Reform, and Institutions: The Social Policy Response to COVID-19 in Australia

Social policy represents a critical dimension of the governmental response to COVID-19. This article analyses the Australian response, which was radical in that it signalled an unprecedented policy turnaround towards welfare generosity and the almost total relaxation of conditionality. It was also surprising because it was introduced by a conservative, anti-welfarist government. The principal argument is that, though the generosity was temporary, it should be understood simultaneously by reference to institutional change and institutional tradition. The ‘change’ element was shaped by the urgency and scale of the crisis, which indicated an institutional ‘critical juncture’. This provided a ‘window of opportunity’ for reform, which would otherwise be closed. ‘Tradition’ was reflected in the nation’s federalist conventions, which partially steered the response. The central implication for other countries is that, amid the uncertainty of a crisis, governments need to consider change within the bounds of their traditional institutions when introducing welfare reform.

The Welfare State as Safety Net in Migration Preferences: Empirical Evidence from an Experiment Among Dutch Master Students

The welfare state can be perceived as a safety net which helps individuals adjust to situations of risk or transition. Starting from this idea of the welfare state as safety net, this study addresses whether and how welfare generosity may influence people’s willingness to migrate. In doing so, we distinguish between two potential mechanisms, innovatively focusing on welfare provisions in both the country of origin and destination. First, a generous welfare system in the country of origin may have a retaining impact, as individuals may be unwilling to migrate to countries offering less social protection. Second, generous welfare provisions in the country of destination may enable migration for individuals who are more intolerant of uncertainty and who otherwise would prefer to remain immobile. We test both mechanisms using stated preference data collected with a unique experimental design among over 300 Dutch Master students. Confirming the first mechanism, we indeed find that respondents report a lower willingness to migrate when evaluating hypothetical scenarios where the level of social protection was higher in the country of origin as compared with the country of destination. Furthermore, and in line with the second mechanism, individuals who are more intolerant of uncertainty generally report a lower willingness to migrate, yet their willingness to migrate increases for scenarios with higher levels of unemployment benefits. Our findings, thus, indeed suggest that welfare arrangements are mainly serving a safety net function and need to be understood in relative terms between the country of origin and destination.

Do generous unemployment benefits facilitate transition into more-secure labour market positions? Insights from a multilevel latent Markov model

A large body of research suggests that generous welfare provisions for jobseekers create a disincentive to work. Other scholars argue that generous benefits can reduce unemployment by serving as a job-search subsidy. One caveat in this literature is that, when testing the two hypotheses, many scholars conceive of labour markets as homogeneous entities or they theoretically assume a certain insider/outsider divide. In this article, we claim that the employment effect of generous benefits varies between labour market segments. Analysing EU-SILC panel data of 27 European countries, we find that more-generous unemployment cash benefits enhance the transition from unemployment into more-secure work while discouraging transition into less-secure work in terms of temporal, economic and organisational security. Contrary to existing research, welfare generosity is measured by aggregated information on individual benefit receipt. Labour market segments are identified by latent class analysis and transitions between segments are estimated by Multilevel Latent Markov Models.

The Welfare Magnet Hypothesis: Evidence from an Immigrant Welfare Scheme in Denmark

We study the effects of welfare generosity on international migration using reforms of immigrant welfare benefits in Denmark. The first reform, implemented in 2002, lowered benefits for non-EU immigrants by about 50 percent, with no changes for natives or EU immigrants. The policy was later repealed and reintroduced. Based on a quasi-experimental research design, we find sizable effects: the benefit reduction reduced the net flow of immigrants by about 5,000 people per year, and the subsequent repeal of the policy reversed the effect almost exactly. The implied elasticity of migration with respect to benefits equals 1.3. This represents some of the first causal evidence on the welfare magnet hypothesis. (JEL F22, H53, I38, J15)

Welfare States in the Middle East

The chapter analyzes the origins and development of welfare provision in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It provides a three-pronged typology of existing welfare regimes in the region along the dimensions of welfare generosity and accessibility. This is followed by a historical institutionalist account of the emergence of Middle Eastern welfare states, which emphasizes the importance of different types of coalitions formed at the critical juncture of regime formation. The chapter then hones in on three major areas of social policy (education, health, and social security) and outlines their development over time. The final section analyzes the effect of war-making on welfare provision in MENA and introduces the concept of “cheap social policies,” using Egypt as an example. The conclusion summarizes the main points and adumbrates future research agendas.

Real but Unequal Representation in Welfare State Reform

Scholars have long debated whether welfare policymaking in industrialized democracies is responsive to citizen preferences and whether such policymaking is more responsive to rich than to poor citizens. Debate has been hampered, however, by difficulties in matching data on attitudes toward particular policies to data on changes in the generosity of actual policies. This article uses better, more targeted measures of policy change that allow more valid exploration of responsiveness for a significant range of democracies. It does so by linking multicountry and multiwave survey data on attitudes toward health, pension, and unemployment policies and data on actual policy generosity, not just spending, in these domains. The analysis reveals that attitudes correlate strongly with subsequent changes in welfare generosity in the three policy areas and that such responsiveness is much stronger for richer than for poorer citizens. Representation is likely real but also vastly unequal in the welfare politics of industrialized democracies.

Protest Events, Welfare Generosity, and Welfare State Regimes

This article examines data from the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive and the Comparative Welfare Entitlements Dataset on protest events, levels of welfare generosity (the extent to which welfare protection is provided by non-market actors), and welfare state regimes in 18 advanced industrialized countries across the period 1971–2002. Using a direct measure of protest events in terms of frequency of riots, demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempted revolutions, the article finds that there is a significant relationship between welfare generosity, welfare state regimes, and protest events. The findings demonstrate that more extensive welfare arrangements—conceptualized through the use of empirical data—not only ameliorate social disadvantages and thus legitimate market economies and capital accumulation, but also bring about stability and social order.