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Journal of Social Policy

（《社会政策杂志》）

的最新目录与摘要

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JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY

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Journal of Social Policy carries high quality articles on all aspects of social policy in an international context. It places particular emphasis upon articles which seek to contribute to debates on the future direction of social policy, to present new empirical data, to advance theories, or to analyse issues in the making and implementation of social policies.

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Journal of Social Policy 为季刊，最新一期（Volume 55 Issue 2, April 2026）共计18篇文章，详情如下。

原版目录

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY

原文摘要

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL POLICY

Articles

Social protection in Latin America: a critical review

Armando Barrientos

Latin American countries have pioneered innovations in social protection, but their welfare institutions suffer from large and persistent gaps and inequalities in access and provision. This article reviews the substantive body of research addressing this anomaly. A focus on social protection offers a window on what is distinctive about social policy in the region. The social protection matrix in Latin America combines three core institutions: occupational insurance funds, personal pensions and social assistance. The article highlights the role of political realignments shaping current institutions. The critical review yields several pointers for a ‘general’ theory of welfare institutions.

Goodbye human annotators? Content analysis of social policy debates using ChatGPT

Erwin Gielens, Jakub Sowula, Philip Leifeld

Content analysis is a valuable tool for analysing policy discourse, but annotation by humans is costly and time consuming. ChatGPT is a potentially valuable tool to partially automate content analysis for policy debates, largely replacing human annotators. We evaluate ChatGPT’s ability to classify documents using pre-defined argument descriptions, comparing its performance with human annotators for two policy debates: the Universal Basic Income debate on Dutch Twitter (2014–2016) and the pension reforms debate in German newspapers (1993–2001). We use the API (GPT-4 Turbo) and user interface version (GPT-4) and evaluate multiple performance metrics (accuracy, precision and recall). ChatGPT is highly reliable and accurate in classifying pre-defined arguments across datasets. However, precision and recall are much lower, and vary strongly between arguments. These results hold for both datasets, despite differences in language and media type. Moreover, the cut-off method proposed in this paper may aid researchers in navigating the trade-off between detection and noise. Overall, we do not (yet) recommend a blind application of ChatGPT to classify arguments in policy debates. Those interested in adopting this tool should manually validate bot classifications before using them in further analyses. At least for now, human annotators are here to stay.

Did increasing the UK’s Universal Credit and working tax credits by £20 per week in 2020–2021 reduce food insecurity?

Rachel Loopstra, Ben Baumberg Geiger, Aaron Reeves

This paper evaluates the UK Government’s decision to increase the main form of social security by £20 per week during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, exploring whether increasing the generosity of social security for some, but not all, claimants affected food insecurity. Using the Family Resources Survey, we found a decline of about 7 percentage points in food insecurity amongst benefit claimants affected by the uplift compared with claimants not affected (95% CI −13.9 to −0.9%). This association did not change substantively following adjustment for covariates, nor when the model was re-estimated using matching methods. Results were not driven by changes in the composition of claimants over time. These analyses suggest food insecurity could be reduced if the generosity of the social security system increased. In actuality, the UK government went in the opposite direction, removing the £20 uplift in October 2021, potentially exposing claimants to higher rates of food insecurity again.

Re-examining ‘personalised conditionality’: full-time obligations, partial adjustments and power asymmetries in the UK’s approach to work-related conditionality

Ceri Hughes

Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.

‘You can see when your parents are struggling’: a qualitative study of children and young people’s views of Universal Credit

Mandy Cheetham, Catherine El-Zerbi, Elaine Bidmead, Steph Morris, Tabitha Dodd

By 2025, over eight million UK households will be receiving Universal Credit (UC). Introduced in 2013 to simplify the benefit system and improve work incentives for working age adults, UC has been criticised for causing hardship and exacerbating inequalities. There is limited research on children and young people’s (CYP) views of UC, as well as its health and social impacts. In this pilot qualitative study, creative methods were used to understand the views of UC among CYP (n = 40) aged 12–16 years in North East England. Findings showed diverse and nuanced understanding of UC as well as contested views about conditionality, sanctions, lower UC rates for under-25s and the two-child limit alongside recognition of the stigma and shame associated with benefits. While CYP value paid employment, they stressed the importance of minimum income standards and tailored employment support for UC claimants, taking account of their personal, health and family circumstances. Findings suggest CYP are aware when parents and carers are struggling financially and may try to ease pressures on parents. Debates about principles of equality, fairness, social justice and deservingness were present in young people’s accounts. We conclude by exploring future directions for a CYP-centred approach to social policy.

Cross-jurisdictional youth employment policy and welfare in Scotland, Wales and England: a street-level perspective

Sioned Pearce, Nivedita Narayan

Here we examine interactions between centralised and devolved employment policy and welfare in Scotland, Wales and England, taking a qualitative approach to gain a street-level perspective. This paper’s twin aims are to challenge the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of welfare regimes and to offer a substate alternative through a street-level perspective. In the context of prevailing trends towards activation measures and mixed economies of welfare across Western Europe, the UK’s work first approach and categorisation as a Liberal welfare regime of minimal provision is complexified using a devolved policy context.Our findings on cross-jurisdictional interactions show devolved employment programmes in Scotland and Wales actively reshaping welfare delivery in ways that resist the UK’s historically centralised approach. We contribute to a growing body of literature on substate welfare regimes with significant implications for the privileging of methodological nationalism in the study of work and welfare.

When education is positional: higher education expansion, welfare regimes and income inequality

Eunjeong Jang

Rectifying the imbalance of theorisation of education expansion focusing on its benefits, this study examines the relationship between education expansion and income inequality by turning our attention to its risky aspects. We investigate how expanding education might not effectively mitigate income inequality, because it brings about costly and risky competition for the positional value of education. We consider welfare regimes as relevant institutional factors associated with educational positionality based on the similarities between two environmental conditions that make education positional and two underlying dimensions of welfare regimes (de-stratification and commodification). We analysed higher education cases in twenty-four to twenty-five developed countries from 2000 to 2020. Our results show that higher education expansion initially reduced income inequality, but the reducing effect was attenuated, and eventually, it increased income inequality when higher education was positional, corresponding to the countries with a liberal regime and two East Asian countries such as Japan and Korea.

When trade-offs touch self-interests: attitudes on education spending in a cross-country analysis

Isik D. Özel, Salvador Parrado, Kerem Yildirim

This paper investigates public attitudes towards education spending based on a survey experiment. It enquires whether a trade-off between education and other welfare domains, namely healthcare, unemployment benefits and pensions, diminishes support for higher public spending on education. Drawing on five Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (Italy, Spain, Greece, Mexico and Turkey), the paper demonstrates that education spending preferences are contingent on the nature of trade-offs and the priorities of the stakeholder groups. Testing the predictive power of age, income, ideology, labour market positioning and gender, our research finds robust support for public spending on education across all countries. Nonetheless, this support diminishes significantly when trade-offs that are linked to cuts in other welfare domains are introduced.

Ecosocial policy and the social risks of climate change: foundations of the US ecosocial safety net

C. Taylor Brown, Yu-Ling Chang

As climate change progresses, natural hazards are projected to continue to increase in frequency and intensity, posing a new form of social risk, implicating both the welfare and environmental state and raising the salience of ecosocial policy as a mechanism to attend to the distributional effects of climate change mitigation and adaptation. This study posits a novel conceptual framework for ecosocial policy and offers the US ecosocial safety net as a case analysis. While we conceptualise disaster relief policy as a mode of the environmental state, it includes unique ecosocial policies that constitute the backbone of the US ecosocial safety net. This study describes and compares the developmental and functional synergies between the US welfare and environmental state manifested in the form of an ecosocial safety net by explicating the Individual Assistance Program and the National Flood Insurance Program. Our findings reveal synergies between US disaster relief and welfare, including parallel developmental trends, philosophies of deserving/undeserving, functions of racial capitalism and relationships with economic growth. This study and its conceptual framework of ecosocial policy offer a groundwork for the study of ecosocial policy in other contexts.

Does the allocation of TANF funds to state EITC programs in the U.S. increase changes in the poverty gap amongst TANF recipients?

Na Yeon Kim

The increasing use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds for state Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) programs in the United States (U.S.) has raised concerns about the diversion of TANF funds for purposes not directly aligned with TANF’s core objectives. This study investigates whether states’ allocation of TANF funds to state EITC programs reduces the overall income of both current and former TANF recipients and potentially widens changes in the poverty gap. Changes in the poverty gap are calculated by subtracting the poverty gap at time t−1 from that at time t, where the poverty gap is defined as the difference between 50 percent of the state median income of households with children and the average income of TANF recipients. This study employs panel data from all fifty states spanning 2008–2016 and utilises fixed-effects estimation. Empirical findings suggest that states’ utilisation of TANF funds to support state EITC programs does not have a statistically significant effect on changes in the poverty gap for TANF recipients. This study proposes that TANF fund diversion may reflect states’ efforts to pursue poverty reduction, particularly given the inconclusive evidence regarding TANF’s anti-poverty impact.

Crisis-proof households? How social policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic imagined work and care in Germany

Hannah Zagel, Emanuela Struffolino

Social policies convey normative assumptions about how households should make ends meet and organise care, but how do these ideals withstand crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic? Previous research shows continuity of welfare state models in the crisis, but mostly looked at single policy fields and produced mixed findings regarding the role of pre-crisis reform trajectories. This paper contributes a detailed analysis of assumptions about the ‘standard productive household’ in terms of three dimensions: labour market participation, coverage of economic needs and coverage of care needs. Drawing on original policy documents enacted in 2020 in Germany – which had dismantled many of its institutional strongholds for the male-breadwinner model before the crisis – we provide two novel insights. First, social policy responses to the pandemic were relatively coherent regarding assumptions about labour market participation, but expectations towards households’ abilities to make ends meet and parents’ care involvement were less coherent. In addition to relaxing conditions on stable employment and income, policy responses normalised patchwork incomes and relied on parents to compress paid and unpaid work. Second, we propose that crises may slow down reform processes that are already underway by reverting to ideas that were dominant in the past.

Towards policies of dignity? The German Participation Opportunities Act as a response to long-term unemployment

Kathrin Englert, Markus Gottwald, Claudia Globisch, Peter Kupka

The Participation Opportunities Act (POA) came into force in Germany in January 2019 with the aim of making publicly subsidised employment accessible to the long-term unemployed, whose prospects of regular employment are poor. The POA responds to a two-fold exclusion suffered by this group: exclusion from the labour market and a kind of ‘internal exclusion’ from social services. We argue that the POA can therefore be understood as a ‘policy of dignity’ and thus as a challenge to the neoliberal recognition order. The aim of this paper is an empirical examination of this thesis based on qualitative interviews with managers and professionals at German job centres. We apply Honneth’s theory of recognition as a theoretical framework and examine two levels of implementation: the interpretation of the law and how it is put into practice from 2019-2023.

Organisational outputs of administrative reforms: disability in Danish job centres

Lena Kjeldsen, Finn Amby, Torben Esbo Agergaard

Employment rates of people with and without disabilities differ substantially in most countries, and policymakers have tried, with mixed effects, to reduce this gap through different policy measures. However, studies show that governance and managerial reforms also affect implementation of policy. In this study, we examine how the Danish large-scale administrative reform of 2007 has affected the role and structure of the approach of the public employment system (PES) to unemployed people with disabilities. Using Pollitt and Bouckeart’s framework on reform effects, we report on a document analysis of policy papers and a 2019 survey of caseworkers and disability keypersons (N = 453). The analysis identifies few and vague objectives on a process and systems level, with the overall goal being more coherent service delivery. Specifically, a new division of tasks between the state and municipal level was established, including the creation of a disability keyperson at the municipal level to inform and guide job centre colleagues in assisting unemployed with disabilities. In practice, most of the keypersons were doing administrative casework and placed in sections focussed on unemployed with a reduced work ability. Hence, we identify a mismatch between objectives and implementation, questioning whether service delivery has become more coherent.

The formation of family policy attitudes: the role of justice perceptions in the division of household labour

Anna Helgøy, Arno Van Hootegem

Welfare state attitudes make up an interactive feedback loop of defining popular legitimacy and future policy trajectories. Understanding attitudinal drivers is thus essential political knowledge. However, as existing research is mainly based on the work-nexus of welfare, this article expands the literature to the welfare state’s care-nexus, examining drivers of family policy attitudes. We argue that conventional attitude predictors of self-interest and ideology are insufficient to explain the attitudinal cleavage in family policy. Instead, justice perceptions in the division of physical and cognitive household labour represent an important normative battleground. We test this with Norwegian survey data (N = 3500), using a unique vignette experiment to operationalise justice perceptions. Findings show that individuals who do not perceive a disproportional household labour division as unfair prefer optional familialism within family policy. Individuals who do perceive unfairness in a disproportional household labour division prefer de-familialism, which facilitates gender equality in public and private spheres. This is consistently found for the physical division of labour, while the cognitive dimension seems less politicised. We conclude that the battleground for different family policy approaches is fundamentally normative and linked to justice considerations on gender roles.

The unexpected impact of geographic access on take-up of social benefits

Momi Dahan, Noam Tarshish

Among the factors identified to account for non-take-up of social benefits, there has been limited research on ‘process costs’, particularly regarding the impact of geographic access. Using Israeli data on field office openings from 1993 to 2021, this paper investigates the impact of geographic access on the take-up of the five largest social security programs in Israel. Based on staggered openings and closings of social security field offices, we find that geographic access has no significant impact on the take-up of either automatic enrollment programs, such as child allowances, or non-automatic programs, such as disability benefits. These findings suggest that the effect of geographic access on the take-up of social benefits may have been overstated in previous studies. We propose the following hypothesis to explain the surprising findings: If enhanced geographic access is driven by political favoritism, opening of new service points may lead to the misallocation of resources and, in effect, increase administrative burdens, thereby undermining rather than improving the take-up of social benefits.

How and why does relational welfare work to support young people not in employment, education or training (NEET)? A realist evaluation

Frida Jonsson, Isa Norvell Gustavsson

The aim of this study was to understand how and why relational welfare works to support young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEET). It builds on research discussing the limitations of work-first and human capital strategies in social policy while responding to calls for theory-driven insights into initiatives that move beyond employability and rapid employment. The material for this realist evaluation includes programme documents, fieldnotes and 75 interviews with practitioners and participants in community-based multicomponent initiatives delivered by Swedish municipalities. These data were scrutinised against programme theories while integrating literature on relational welfare as underpinned by co-creation and capability approaches. The results illustrate how flexible, challenging and coordinated programming strengthen beings and doings of young people in NEET situations while improving their wellbeing by overcoming isolation and forming a future orientation. The study provides guidance for supporting NEET-situated young people through a relational approach to welfare. It also offers a model against which local initiatives provided to a youth group high on the policy agenda can be mapped.

Varieties of engagement: exploring the micro-practices of managers in employing disadvantaged jobseekers

Siri Yde Aksnes, Eric Breit

Despite the increased emphasis on ‘employer engagement’ to take advantage of demand-side active labour market policies, little attention has been paid to managers. In this paper, we examine the micro-practices of engaged managers in including jobseekers from disadvantaged groups. Through a qualitative study of managers, jobseekers and other stakeholders in twenty-one companies with a history of employing disadvantaged jobseekers, we identify three broad types of engagement by managers: vacancy-oriented, ability-oriented, and growth-oriented. The types of engagement involve crucial differences in motivation, caring and accommodation on the part of the employing managers. Our findings highlight the multi-facetedness of employer engagement when examined from the perspective of managers and propose ‘inclusive leadership’ as a useful lens to understand engaged employers.

Emergency Responses to COVID-19 and Opportunities for Inclusive Social Policy

Juliana Martínez Franzoni, Diego Sánchez-Ancochea

This article addresses whether responses to COVID-19 created opportunities for future policy change. We explore this matter by presenting a framework rooted in political economy and the literature on pandemics. We argue that the opportunities created by emergency responses are context-specific and that narratives, policy tools, and pro-equity state actors are variables that mediate emergency responses and future opportunities. We ground our analytical contribution on the emergency cash transfers deployed during 2020 following the COVID-19 outbreak in two contrasting Central American countries, Costa Rica and Guatemala. The paper promotes further policy discussion on the opportunities for progressive change in unequal contexts.

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《中国社会学学刊》（The Journal of Chinese Sociology）于2014年10月由中国社会科学院社会学研究所创办。作为中国大陆第一本英文社会学学术期刊，JCS 致力于为中国社会学者与国外同行的学术交流和合作打造国际一流的学术平台。JCS由全球最大科技期刊出版集团施普林格·自然(Springer Nature)出版发行，由国内外顶尖社会学家组成强大编委会队伍，采用双向匿名评审方式和“开放获取”(open access)出版模式。JCS已于2021年5月被ESCI收录。2022年，JCS的CiteScore分值为2.0（Q2），在社科类别的262种期刊中排名第94位，位列同类期刊前36%。2025年JCS 最新影响因子1.3，位列社会学领域期刊全球前53%（Q3）。2025年JCS 的CiteScore分值为3.4，在社科类别的286本期刊中排名第75位，位列同类期刊前27%（Q2）。