Global Social Policy

This study employs fuzzy set analysis to categorize childcare policies across 19 OECD member countries, emphasizing defamilization strategies focusing on policy tool mixes. It investigates whether these strategies are state-centered or market-centered by analyzing the directness of funding, service creation, and the coerciveness of quality regulations. Key variables include the co-payment proportion of dual-income families, public preschool utilization rates, and monitoring intensity of childcare services, with women’s employment rates as the outcome. The analysis identifies six childcare service models based on government involvement and market dynamics, revealing that women’s employment rates tend to be higher when childcare services are predominantly market-driven. This suggests that market forces play a significant role in the defamilization of childcare, particularly as women’s participation in the labor market grows.

Although comparative welfare research has long criticized that the social insurance system in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) fails to cover the under-privileged population, very little is known about the discrepancy between social insurance legislation and its practice. In LMICs, social insurance legislation has remained only on the books for a long time, which prevents citizens from accessing their ‘entitled’ benefits. By analyzing the gap between the de jure and de facto coverage of maternity leave in 73 LMICs, this article provides the first systematic overview of the discrepancy between social insurance law and practice in different world regions. The empirical findings show that nearly a third of LMICs provide de jure universal coverage but only very few adhere to the promise. Low state capacity, prevalent corruption, and poor policy design impede the effective implementation of social insurance legislation.

In addition to reducing the effectiveness of welfare policies, a high level of corruption is argued to undermine the social legitimacy of the welfare state. In the current article, we subject this hypothesis to an empirical test by analyzing data from two rounds of the International Social Survey Program. We find that people have a greater preference for an extensive welfare state in countries where corruption is more widespread. Similarly, at the micro level, perceived corruption is associated with more support for welfare policies, though people who have experienced corruption show less support than others for welfare. The extent of corruption in a country also moderates the effects of two primary determinants of welfare preferences – self-interest and political affiliation.

Most literature on labour relations has concentrated on the roles of unions and left-wing parties in advancing social welfare, while studies on social protection have typically emphasized state-driven processes. This article offers a novelty perspective by examining how collective bargaining influences social protection. Focusing on the case of Wage Councils in Uruguay from 2005 to 2018, the article employs a comprehensive empirical analysis that includes an original collection of 327 collective bargaining agreements and in-depth interviews. The findings indicate that while collective bargaining is a vital mechanism for enhancing overall social welfare, it can also create disparities in access to and the quality of benefits among different groups. This situation contributes to the segmentation of social protection processes.

This article examines the World Bank’s role as a ‘problem broker’ in national policymaking, specifically its influence on healthcare financing policy, using the case of Albania’s healthcare financing reforms (1995–2013). While the Bank is widely acknowledged as a ‘Knowledge Bank’, its role in problematising national issues remains underexplored. Employing qualitative methods, including content and frame analysis of Technical Assistance reports, the study explores how the Bank’s problem-brokering activities and its framing of reform issues shaped national policy actors’ perceptions. The analysis highlights the Bank’s influence in guiding national policy agendas through problematisation, extending its influence beyond the traditional role of a ‘proposal actor’. This study enriches our understanding of the Bank’s ideational, non-coercive influence in national policy arenas, complementing existing literature on its conditional and coercive power.