Welfare Cuts Research Articles

Was Brexit really about Europe ?

Much of the debate about Brexit, during the referendum and afterwards, was not obviously about Europe at all. There were perhaps five general themes that shaped the argument : (i) The impact of austerity after the 2008 credit crash, the fall in real wages and welfare cuts. This particularly influenced Labour voters. (ii) Disaffection with the union of the United Kingdom, especially in Scotland.(iii) Discontent with party politics. The traditional two-party polarization and been in decline from the early 1970s. (iv) Immigration. Heavy migration from Eastern Europe from 2004 onwards had an emotional impact in old industrial areas which had little or no immigration at all.(iv) Britain’s post-imperial destiny, especially the decline of its great-power status since 1940. Some dreamed of a Joseph-Chamberlain-type ‘anglophone’ bloc, or reviving Churchillian greatness. But European ‘control’ seemingly blocked the way.Thus Britain’s strengths seemed to lie elsewhere – in its soft power, culturally and intellectually. But this suggested new social division, elitism based not on class but on education. It followed new attacks on established institutions, the constitution, the judges, the BBC, the churches, perhaps in time even the monarchy. The Olympic Games of 2012 inspired internal solidarity, including emphases on British rights of protest and women. That spirit must be revived to regenerate the European idea.

The impact of student financial aid reforms on leaving home: Evidence from the Netherlands

AbstractTo save costs, young adults may delay leaving the parental home in times of welfare cuts. However, although the impact of student financial aid reforms on educational decisions has received considerable attention in previous research, the impact on leaving home has not previously been studied. Using register data, this study investigates how recent student aid reforms in the Netherlands have impacted students' home‐leaving decisions. Event history models suggest that students who started studying after the reforms are substantially less likely to leave the parental home than students who began studying before the reforms. These findings underline the importance of the family for support: The family tends to take over when state support declines. The findings for income patterns are mixed. The decrease is greater for low‐income students relative to middle‐income students, whereas there is no difference in the effect of the reforms between low‐income and high‐income students.

Discarding social investment and redistribution in the name of austerity? The case of Finnish family policy reforms 2007—2015

ABSTRACTSince the 1970s, Finland has conducted family policies that could be labelled social investments, for example, investments in work–family balance or public childcare, while at the same time it has protected the economic standard of families with children through various income transfers. However, after the 2008–2009 financial crisis these policies including those with socially investing objectives have been increasingly subjected to cuts in benefit levels and entitlements in order to lower public expenditure, which raises the question if there has been a shift away from social investments and redistribution towards austerity policies. By analysing government programs from the period 2007–2015, this article discusses if, and to what extent, such a change can be traced in the Finnish government discourse. More specifically the article studies the narrative stories used to legitimise changes (reforms) in existing family policy and to what extent these changes were informed by a social investment perspective focusing on ‘new’ social risks, a traditional redistribution perspective emphasising ‘old’ social risks, or a neoliberal austerity perspective advocating fiscal austerity and welfare cuts. We argue that the first two perspectives were dominant prior to and during the first phase of the international financial crisis, whereas the third perspective became dominant after the crisis. Moreover, the results show that the main storyline in the legitimisation of the reforms was stories of ‘progress’ in combination with stories of ‘control’ and helplessness’.

The Impact of Austerity Measures on Social Security Beneficiaries: The Case of Greece

This article discusses how welfare cuts in Greece affected social insurance beneficiaries’ access to better living conditions by raising the question why welfare benefits are not excluded from cuts even though they obviously minimize poverty rates in people of the third and fourth age. It focuses on the Memoranda reform measures imposed after 2010 acknowledging on the one hand that these measures are for the most part unjustifiable and in parallel locating which changes have been accepted and welcomed by the social insurance fund executives.

Creating capabilities for societal participation in times of welfare state change? Experiences of people with disabilities in Finland

Societal participation is central for disability policies throughout the world. In a Finnish setting, it is firmly anchored in the welfare state's commitment to create equal capabilities, but it is also dependent on other prerequisites, such as an inclusive labour market. However, these commitments have become both increasingly important through efforts of strengthening the rights of people with disabilities as well as increasingly challenged by crumbling growth and recurrent austerity measures in social policy. This article explores societal participation of people with disabilities in Finland in times of the recent ratification process of the UN CRPD and welfare cuts, and investigates the subjective experiences of societal participation in a changing welfare state context. The data consists of 13 individual qualitative interviews among working-age people with different kinds of disabilities. The findings highlight the importance of state commitment for creating equal capabilities for societal participation and for removing barriers standing in its way. They also suggest that this commitment is becoming both strengthened by the UN CRPD and weakened by the economic crisis and austerity measures and that this may have an undermining effect upon capabilities for persons with disabilities to participate in society.

‘You are a parasite on the productive classes’: online disablist hate speech in austere times

In response to a climate of austerity, disability has been keyed to a meta-narrative that has a political purpose, to justify extensive welfare cuts by positioning disability as a drain on so-called ‘hard-working taxpayers’. This paper explores how this meta-narrative is articulated on the online bulletin board, Reddit, to show how disablist hate speech may emerge as an attempt to secure one’s sense of self during austere times. A critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to reveal these instances and highlights the normalisation of disablist hate speech within the wider context of welfare dependency. Based on these findings, this paper makes recommendations for future research and makes a call for policy change.

Young and homeless

Young and homeless

The influence of institutional discourses on the work of informal carers: an institutional ethnography from the perspective of informal carers

BackgroundThe growing numbers of seniors worldwide and the need for support and services that follow from a higher standard of living have led to an increased focus on scarce benefits and limited human resources. At the same time, many western countries have had to make welfare cuts to balance budgets. This has brought the contributions of informal carers to the fore. Thus far, the focus has generally been on the need for the informal carers to receive information and support; to enable them to contribute.MethodsThe study is designed as an institutional ethnography. The article describes the social processes of informal caregiving and how it interacts with formal caregiving, from the perspective of informal carers. The research question for the study is How do institutional discourses on the work of informal carers influence informal carework? Data for the article comes from qualitative semi-structured interviews with 26 informal carers caring for persons with dementia in Norway, and with 7 administrators working in the allocation divisions of five different municipalities.ResultsThe results demonstrate how three institutional discourses of informal carers’ work influence the allocation divisions’ practices and the work of informal carers in caring for their next of kin. The three discourses are categorised as moral and family obligation, shared care and task specificity. The informal carers want to contribute, as they feel a family and moral obligation to their next of kin. In the interaction with the allocation division, they find that the expectation that they will share in the carework and perform specific tasks forces them to perform care within a framework set by the public services.ConclusionsThe findings suggest that further research should challenge how services are distributed and allocated rather than focus on how to enable informal carers to fulfil their role better. Because of their moral and family obligation, the informal carers do not have to be forced to perform certain tasks or parts of the shared care. To maintain the informal carers’ carework and to fully utilise their contributions, public services would benefit from collaborating with the informal carers to fulfil the total care need of the person with dementia.

“Race” and the upsurge of antagonistic popular movements in Sweden

ABSTRACTAcross a crisis-stricken Europe battles rage for post-neoliberal hegemony, with “race” and “austerity” as central signifiers. One of the places where the frontlines are most pregnant is Sweden; long perceived as a role model for its welfare state, cultural equity and social equality. Sweden is, however, facing social conflicts following in the tracks of a deep transformation in terms of welfare cuts, racialization and growing social polarization, targeting in particular a disadvantaged migrant and post-migrant population. On that background, the paper focuses on the upsurge of mutually antagonistic popular movements – “racist” and “anti-racist”. We use Sweden as an exemplary case of Europe’s present Polanyian moment, reminiscent of the 1930s. Yet, current upheavals expound, the authors claim, a different configuration of crisis and racism as well as a dissimilar utopia for the imagineering of nation and community.

Privatization, Financialization and State Restructuring in Eastern Germany: The case of Am südpark

AbstractUsing a mix of survey data, results from a study on local planning politics and fieldwork, this article discusses the interplay of planning and welfare policies with global financial markets in the ‘making’ of social segregation in Halle‐Neustadt, a borough in the German city of Halle (Saale). Here, different developments come together. First, Halle‐Neustadt has experienced two waves of privatization, leading to a complete change of ownership structures, marked by the rise of financial investors. Second, welfare cuts have put increasing pressure on welfare recipients to live in the cheapest housing available. This has led to the emergence of a ‘Hartz IV business model’ based on low, but state‐subsidized, rents. Third, new planning policies have led to a massive drop in house prices, thus facilitating the use of ‘leverage’ strategies for financial investors. We expand on an already developed debate, providing new insights about relations between planning, state restructuring and financialization in a German context. We demonstrate that a broad array of changes in national regulatory settings, policy change in different sectors and local particularities can all be crucial in enabling financialization. We conclude that research should place greater emphasis on the state in providing explanations and take differences in context more seriously.

A home of one’s own? Housing welfare for ‘young adults’ in times of austerity

This article considers how welfare cuts in ‘austerity Britain’ have impacted young adults’ access to a home of their own, asking at what stage in the life-course should the welfare state be expected to support someone’s residential independence? The article focuses on the 2012 changed age-threshold for the Shared Accommodation Rate of Local Housing Allowance, which meant that single people (without dependants) aged between 25 and 34 are only entitled to claim the cost of a single room in a shared property. This policy has highlighted the issue of forced sharing, and poses questions as to whether a shared property with strangers can necessarily always be considered a home. The article identifies the persistence of normative conceptions of household transition across the life-course. Ultimately the article concludes that these normative assumptions enable policy makers to promote this policy as a matter of ‘fairness’ rather than a form of social injustice.

Subjects of, or subject to, policy reform? A Foucauldian discourse analysis of regulation and resistance in UK narratives of educational impacts of welfare cuts: The case of the ‘bedroom tax’

This paper draws on material generated from a qualitative study of educational impacts of a British welfare reform affecting housing rent subsidy, size and location commonly known as ‘the bedroom tax’ (Bragg et al., 2015), which was partly taken as a topic for study specifically because of its iconic status as a controversial and unpopular welfare ‘reform’ (or cut). The analysis draws on Foucauldian understandings of subjectification or subject-formation - as elaborated both from within and in relation to the social (Foucault, 1970; 1983; Ball, 1990; Olssen, 2006; Popkewitz & Brennan, 1998), read through new and newly available perspectives (Allen, 2015; Pêcheux, 2014). This approach is applied to discuss how those addressed by educational policy, and also as research participants, are both subject to prevailing political and practice-oriented discourses (of educational ‘problems’, and of the neoliberal frameworks by which poverty and welfare cuts are discussed), but also – at times – how they can become the subject of – in the sense of reformulating – these discourses in their accounts of everyday activities. After outlining our approach and the context for the study, we focus on four examples drawn from the narratives of the various stakeholders in the study – parents/carers, school staff and other community-based organisations as illustrations of how this discursive approach can provide rich readings of relevance to educational policy debates. From these we not only take further discussions of the production and regulation of subjectivities via social and educational policy practices, but also offer indicative glimpses of resistance to this as expressed by those who are its primary subjects, and where in one case such resistance brings our own research commitments under critical scrutiny. As such, the contribution of this article is both topic-related (concerning the educational impacts of policy) but, crucially, also conceptual and methodological, in motivating for a Foucauldian-influenced discursive approach that is sensitive to struggle and resistance.

The impact on welfare and public finances of job loss in industrial Britain

It is important to take a long view of many economic problems. This article explains how the large-scale loss of industrial jobs in parts of Britain during the 1980s and 1990s still inflates the contemporary budget deficit in the United Kingdom. Drawing on the findings of several empirical studies by the authors, the article shows that although there has been progress in regeneration the consequences of job loss in Britain’s older industrial areas have been near-permanently higher levels of worklessness, especially incapacity benefits, low pay, and a major claim on present-day public finances to pay for both in-work and out-of-work benefits. Furthermore, as the UK government implements reductions in welfare spending the poorest places are being hit hardest. In effect, communities in older industrial Britain now face punishment in the form of welfare cuts for the destruction previously wrought to their industrial base.

The Study Area

The Study Area

Uma análise de género da Grande Recessão e do “austericídio” em Espanha

This paper analyses the consequences of the latest recession and austerity measures for the working and living conditions of women and men in Spain, as well as the extent to which gender and other related inequalities are being modified or aggravated. Women are taking on additional responsibilities in terms of unpaid care work due to welfare cuts and privatization, while still facing discrimination in the labour market and in accessing resources and decision-making centres. This refamiliarization of care, together with increasing job insecurity, could have a major negative impact on the well-being of women and their present and future opportunities, which may endanger the fragile gains achieved in terms of gender equality.

Una crítica desde la economía feminista a la salida austericida de la crisis

Este artículo emplea el análisis feminista para estudiar las consecuencias de la crisis y de las políticas de austeridad sobre el trabajo y condiciones de vida de mujeres y hombres, y el impacto sobre las desigualdades de género y otras que las atraviesan. La refamilización de los cuidados, por el adelgazamiento del Estado y las privatizaciones, y el incremento de la precariedad laboral están teniendo un fuerte impacto negativo en el bienestar y las oportunidades presentes y futuras de las mujeres, que pueden poner en riesgo los aún débiles avances conseguidos en igualdad de género.

Credit inclusion and the home credit market in post-communist member states of the European Union

Credit inclusion has emerged as an important policy issue in post-communist member states of the European Union because of reductions in state welfare. Sub-prime lenders have emerged to fill the gap left by welfare cuts for low-income consumers who do not qualify for mainstream credit. Home collected credit has become established in post-communist member states but high interest and administrative costs make this an expensive option resulting in vulnerable people becoming involved in a cycle of indebtedness. Some of the important consequences for social policy are addressed.

Distributional impact assessments and the record of the Coalition Government: the tyranny of numbers without interpretation

This paper reflects upon the gross discrepancies between the reassurances given in 2010 by the 2010-2015 UK Coalition Government that their budget and welfare cuts would fall ‘fairly’ across the income spectrum, and the reality of what had happened by the end of that government. It asks how the ‘distributional impact assessment’ provided with the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review could have been so wrong. In seeking to answer this question, types of systematic bias are considered along with a discussion of ‘marginality’ in assessments of impact. Drawing upon the role of ‘power’ in impact assessment, it traces the ways in which methodological assumptions can eclipse the real life effects of policies behind ‘the average’ as well as by the unfair selection of the ‘unit-of-analysis’.

Comment from the Field

Organized by Katherine Runswick-Cole, Senior Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, this symposium took place in February 2016. Hosted by newly established Critical & Community Psychology Research Group, Research Centre for Social Change: Community Wellbeing event brought together a cohort of scholars working at cutting edge of disability studies. Exploring, challenging, and breaking free from rigid understandings of what it means to be human, day's speakers invited us to resist myth of normality.Dr Kirsty Liddiard opened symposium with a talk entitled What's Love Got to Do with It? Austerity, Intimacy and Humanity. Opening her discussion, she postulated that assumptions of intimate have been culturally invigorated to inform a contracted aesthetics of body. Deconstructing the intimate politics of austerity through politicized lens of a well-known Tory story, she exposed recent policy initiatives as predicated upon ableist assumptions. These ableist assumptions ultimately govern right way that bodies and minds must be intimate. Among others, Dr Liddiard gave example of bedroom tax to explicate more clearly how a Tory story seeks to denigrate disabled bodies. Introduced in 2012, bedroom tax designates a limited physical space within which bodies are expected to remain. Bodies that do not comply are dehumanized by humiliating and derogative assumption that disabled bodies take up too much space-a space that disrupts and unsettles cultural delineation of appropriate intimacy. To this end, Dr Liddiard pointed out that home is no longer a space of ultimate and private intimacy, but a politically contaminated space targeted by welfare cuts. Making reference to a discussion that unfolded later in day, she presented to audience dis/humanity as an ideological movement to trouble and re-fashion liberal citizenship (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 4). This disruption, she suggested, is vital to accessing new creativities of dis/ human narratives.Dr Katherine Runswick-Cole delivered a paper titled Disability, Childhood and Human: Refusing Monstrosity. Reflecting back to a cultural history that connected disabled children to perceptions of monstrosity, she drew upon vandalism of synonymizing children with unpredictability, curiosity, and fear (de Montaigne). By outlining historical dehumanization of disabled children, need to challenge cultural constructs of normality is made prominent. Here, Dr Runswick-Cole departs slightly from previous attempts to expand narrow construct of normal. Indeed, she suggested that such a process will expand to include some while continuing to exclude others. What is necessary, then, is not an expansion of cultural category of normality, but disruption of its very existence. Explicating a critical disruption, she explored dis/human. Such a framing demands a consideration of sameness and difference simultaneously. As noted by audience, this may perpetuate tensions, conflicts, and complexities of disability within an ableist world. Yet, Dr Runswick-Cole justified dis/human logic by outlining how encounters with an ableist world are not simple. Rather, they are often uncomfortable, awkward, and ambiguous. By recognizing this uncertainty, we can begin to think of new ways to affirm diversity. Disability is presented as an opportunity to transcend boundaries of humanity, personal, self, and Other. Such thinking brings disability studies to forefront of criticality, to develop a theory which both troubles and reshapes human using crip ambitions, while also asserting humanity of disabled people, termed by Dr RunswickCole as normative desires (Goodley and Runswick-Cole).Bringing an anthropological trajectory to day, Phil Bayliss's talk, Carpetbaggers, Jaguars and Vultures: Perspectivism in a Neoliberal Universe, further elaborated on consequences of neoliberalism. …

‘Generation rent’ and the ability to ‘settle down’: economic and geographical variation in young people’s housing transitions

ABSTRACTThe term ‘Generation Rent’ denotes young people who are increasingly living in the private rented sector for longer periods of their lives because they are unable to access homeownership or social housing. Drawing on qualitative data from two studies with young people and key-actors, this paper considers the phenomenon of ‘Generation Rent’ from the perspective of youth transitions and the concept of ‘home’. These frameworks posit that young people leaving the parental home traverse housing and labour markets until they reach a point of ‘settling down’. However, our data indicate that many young people face difficulties in this ‘settling’ process as they have to contend with insecure housing, unstable employment and welfare cuts which often force them to be flexible and mobile. This leaves many feeling frustrated as they struggle to remain fixed in place in order to ‘settle down’ and benefit from the positive qualities of home. Taking a Scottish focus, this paper further highlights the geographical dimension to these challenges and argues that those living in expensive and/or rural areas may find it particularly difficult to settle down.