Welfare Cuts Research Articles

Mothers' postdivorce earnings in the context of welfare policy change

We examined in this study the implications of divorce for mothers' earnings, comparing the 1990s and the 2000s, and illuminating developments in welfare policy for single‐parent families over those two decades. After the welfare reform of 2003, the economic autonomy of single mothers, established through a combination of welfare state‐based benefits and paid labour, was delegitimised, with a turn toward the marketplace. Using a unique data set created for this research by merging Israeli census files for 1995–2008, annual administrative employment records from the National Insurance Institute and the Tax Authority, and data from the Civil Registry of Divorce, we found that most mothers tended to increase their income from paid labor following divorce. However, they did so significantly more prior to the welfare cuts than after the cuts. The results can inform policy discussions about how mothers' postdivorce earnings might be affected by welfare policy shifts.

Food Banks: A Lens on the Hungry Body

Food Banks: A Lens on the Hungry Body

SOUND((ING))S

SOUND((ING))S takes place at sea. It constitutes part of an ongoing poetic sequence, the first sections of which were text-based: Collecting Shells (2011), The Sea Quells (2013) and CONT. (2015). The latter was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London as part of Poetry and Sound on 5 February 2016. This section will be played as a sound-based installation on board a chartered vessel as it crosses the English Channel, sailing between Dover and Calais with provisions for refugees based near the French port.Human crisis at sea demands a poetic practice that is prepared to go to sea as a form of research and witness. This installation ‘maps’ two means of crossing one border: by sea, across the Channel and underneath the seabed, through the Channel Tunnel. It invites a process of ‘reading’ that is informed by the scientific process of echo sounding, or ‘sounding the depths’, which is used to measure depth in liquid and to recover bodies lost at sea. Layered auditory patterns and increasingly heavy rhymes simulate traditional sounding methods, whereby weights were lowered down piano wires. Listeners can ‘dredge’ for submerged—and suppressed—content relating to the killing of migrants by neglect across Europe through programmes like Frontex’s Operation Triton in the Mediterranean Sea in 2014, which replaced search and rescue procedures with a mission ‘to control borders and not to rescue at sea’. The installation’s bilingual wordplay destabilises two languages used to deny migrants movement across the English-French border.The work offers the recovery and re-appropriation of sounds from and about the human body—the female body in patriarchal language, the disabled body in an age of austerity and welfare cuts and the asylum-seeking body within the EU. Drawing on a secondary meaning of the phrase ‘to take soundings’, which is ‘to canvas opinion’, the installation includes a petition calling on the UK government to provide legal, safe passage for a greater number of refugees.

A nomadic war machine in the metropolis

This paper builds upon Colin McFarlane's 2011 call in City for an ‘assemblage urbanism’ to supplement critical urbanism. It does so by mapping the spatio-political contours of London's 21st-century housing crisis through the geophilosophical framework of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus ([1980] 2013, London: Bloomsbury] and Hardt and Negri's analysis of the metropolis in Commonwealth (2009, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). The paper examines the Focus E15 housing campaign based around a group of young mothers in the East London borough of Newham. In 2013, the mothers were living in the Focus E15 foyer supported housing unit for young people in Newham, but they were subsequently threatened with eviction as a result of welfare cuts. After successfully contesting the mothers’ own prospective expulsion from the city, the campaign shifted to the broader struggle for ‘social housing not social cleansing’. The paper draws upon participant observation at campaign events and interviews with key members. The Focus E15 campaign has engaged in a series of actions which form a distinctive way of undertaking housing politics in London, a politics that can be understood using a Deleuzoguattarian framework. Several campaign actions, including temporary occupations, are analysed. It is argued that these actions have created ‘smooth space’ in a manner which is to an extent distinctive from many other London housing campaigns which are rooted in a more sedentary defensive approach based around the protection of existing homes and communities—‘our place’. It is such spatio-political creativity—operating as a ‘nomadic war machine'—which has given rise to the high-profile reputation of the Focus E15 campaigners as inspirational young women who do not ‘know their place’.

Individualising the future: the emotional geographies of neoliberal governance in young people's aspirations

In response to record levels of youth worklessness and socio‐economic inequalities, the UK Coalition Government has sought to scale back public spending through welfare cuts, emphasising self‐reliance for financial provision. Education, as a tool for both personal progression and national economic competitiveness, has risen up the political agenda, as the Government champions an ‘aspiration nation’ that rewards ‘hard‐working’ people. Young people are increasingly tasked with looking toward the future, taking responsibility and ‘raising’ their aspirations in order to contribute through economic production as active citizen‐workers. The power to achieve is placed firmly at the feet of individuals; yet broader inequalities that characterise the contemporary climate and powerfully shape the life chances of young people are overlooked. This paper explores the hopes and expectations of young people living in the north west of England as they think about their own future school‐to‐employment ambitions. The paper reflects on the structural changes that have occurred within the local economy over the last generation before examining how the task of responding to changing labour market conditions is internalised by the young people, with ‘success’ (or lack thereof) framed as an individual enterprise. Young people are negotiating a set of contradictory beliefs. They acknowledge their own responsibility as future adult citizens while also reflecting on the role of government in addressing inequalities, as contemporary economic restructuring and fiscal policies are reducing opportunities. The paper makes visible the emotional burdens young people anticipate as they endeavour to achieve a successful future in the context of economic uncertainty and an individualising political milieu of aspiration.

Framing Effects and Comparative Social Policy Reform: Comparing Blame Avoidance Evidence from Two Experiments

Following Paul Pierson’s work on the New Politics of the welfare state, numerous studies on welfare state reforms have shown that governments enacting welfare cuts regularly employ blame avoidance strategies and use issue frames when they communicate welfare reform policies. However, it remains largely unexplained to what extent these blame avoidance strategies really impact on the attitudes of voters on the micro level. This study sets out to fill that void in the literature. Using data on pension reforms and student grant cutbacks, the article provides experimental evidence showing that blame avoidance and framing strategies affect individual attitudes towards the proposed policies – in particular in the case of pension reforms. Moreover, in the case of pensions, the impact is conditioned by individual risk exposure. These results add significantly to the literature on blame avoidance and welfare state reform policies by indicating that successful blame avoidance may be the reason why governments are not always punished for cutbacks to the welfare state.

Negotiating the risk of debt‐financed higher education: The experience of lone parent students

Widening participation has opened higher education (HE) to diverse learners, but in doing so has created challenges negotiating situations of disadvantaged positioning compared with peers conforming more closely to the ideal ‘bachelor boy’ student. As one of the most financially vulnerable groups of students, lone parents occupy a doubly precarious position negotiating the challenges, including financial constraints, of both university participation and raising children alone. Their experiences of HE participation are particularly important to understand as increasing financial precariousness of both studentship and lone parenthood squeezes them further through concurrent rising university fees and welfare cuts. This paper draws on insights from longitudinal qualitative research with 77 lone mothers in England to explore the negotiation of social and economic risks and rewards involved in their undertaking of a debt‐financed higher education.

Dorling, D.Unequal Health: The Scandal of Our Times. Bristol: Policy Press. 2013. 400pp £24.99 ISBN 978–1‐44730513–2 (pbk)Dorling, D.Inequality and the 1%. London: Verso. 2014. 234pp £12.99 ISBN 978–1‐78168585–3 (pbk)

Dorling, D.Unequal Health: The Scandal of Our Times. Bristol: Policy Press. 2013. 400pp £24.99 ISBN 978–1‐44730513–2 (pbk)Dorling, D.Inequality and the 1%. London: Verso. 2014. 234pp £12.99 ISBN 978–1‐78168585–3 (pbk)

Welfare state retrenchment and increasing mental health inequality by educational credentials in Finland: a multicohort study

ObjectivesEpidemiological studies have shown an association between educational credentials and mental disorders, but have not offered any explanation for the varying strength of this association in different historical contexts. In...

El Estado social y la fragilidad de los derechos sociales en tiempos de crisis económica

En este trabajo el autor expone cómo el contexto socioeconómico actual y la crisis económica en la que nos hallamos inmersos está agudizando la crisis del Estado social. Se hace un breve diagnóstico de la crisis de este modelo de Estado y de su incidencia sobre uno de sus elementos estructurales, los derechos sociales. El autor se ocupa también del examen de la denominada cláusula de la «reserva de lo posible»,como límite a la efectividad de los derechos sociales, y de su conexión con otro problema, el de la reversibilidad o no de las normas reconocedoras de derechos sociales. Los recortes sociales están afectando especialmente a algunos colectivos vulnerables como el de los extranjeros irregulares. En este artículo se analiza también la restricción que sobre el derecho a la asistencia sanitaria de este colectivo se ha llevado a cabo por el Real Decreto-ley 16/2012, de 20 de abril y la diferente ejecución que de él han realizado algunas Comunidades Autónomas

Welfare reforms and cuts are hitting people with disabilities

I am pleased a number of religious leaders have spoken out about their concerns that the government’s welfare reforms are punishing the poor, leaving more and more people destitute.

Gender equality and the impact of recession and austerity in the UK

This article explores how the experience of recession followed by austerity in the UK has differed not only by gender but also by ethnicity. This is undertaken through examining labour market developments and government policy responses in the immediate recession and the phase of unfurling austerity. The findings highlight both the varying overall effects by gender and the tendency for ethnic minority women and men to have fared worse than UK born white women and men in the recession. Austerity policies, it is argued, are furthermore intensifying the underlying fault lines in the UK’s high inequality economic model and will place future pressures that disproportionately affect women though public sector job and welfare cuts.

Italian Welfare in the Aftermath of the Economic Crisis: Neoliberal Reforms and Limits to the Path Dependency Approach

The 2008 world economic crisis provided a plausible rationale for policy makers in Italy to push forward long needed welfare cuts, resulting in the neoliberal austerity trend fostered by the Monti government (2011-2012). This paper seeks to understand the logic behind the welfare reforms in Italy after the 2008 economic crisis by describing implemented measures and reviewing available theoretical approaches in literature that could account for the reforms’ neoliberal shift from a path-dependent theoretical approach. It is argued that external forces, that is the economic crisis and EU pressures, represented the main trigger, and that political elites marginalized the role played by civil society, with social problems, such as unemployment, worsening as a result.

Shrinking the welfare state: the structure, geography and impact of British government benefit cuts

Welfare spending is currently a key element of government expenditure in western countries and it has grown considerably since the Second World War. But there have been calls for cuts in spending that have intensified since the onset of the financial crisis and the stress on austerity. This has been associated with a shift in the nature of welfare policy to what has been termed ‘workfare’, where benefits are increasingly means tested, time limited or financially capped and contingent on recipients seeking work. This shift has been seen in Britain since 1997 but has intensified since the election of the coalition government, who have instigated the most radical reshaping of welfare policy since 1945. The paper argues that geographers should pay more attention to the geography of welfare spending. The paper examines the structure of welfare spending in Britain and its geography, the nature and rationale for the welfare reforms and cuts, especially the stress on ‘fairness’, and the social and geographical impact of the benefit cap. It argues that the cuts point to a re‐orientation of the welfare state and pose political problems for the Opposition, given the shift in social attitudes to welfare.

Fact or fiction? Welfare cuts and fiscal adjustments

AbstractGovernments in the industrialised western democracies have repeatedly been advised to curb the welfare state when adjusting public finances in order to stabilise public debt in the long run and to create economic growth. This recommendation has been founded on a vast body of research on fiscal adjustments, which has come to the conclusion that cutting social expenditures leads to expansionary and more sustainable budget consolidations. This paper adds to the existing literature suggesting a more nuanced view, which challenges the simplicity of the “cutting-welfare” advice: first, we find that whereas less social spending is indeed associated with expansionary and successful adjustments, this is not the case for overall welfare state generosity. Second, disaggregating the welfare state in its components reveals that a reduction of pension generosity is indeed related to successful adjustments whereas reducing unemployment generosity does not seem to play a major role.

Why Did Austrian Business Oppose Welfare Cuts? How the Organization of Interests Shapes Business Attitudes Toward Social Partnership

In recent decades, business interests became protagonists of welfare retrenchment in many countries. In contrast, Austria’s national business organization, the WKÖ (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich), defended welfare programs and social partnership against government initiatives to dismantle them. Drawing on interviews and media reports, this article analyzes the reasons for this deviation, focusing on reforms in two fields: (a) public pensions and (b) social insurance administration. The article suggests that the institutional setup of interest representation in Austria explains this stance better than alternative explanations that focus on competitive advantages. The article identifies compulsory membership, equal voting rights, and encompassing organization as the relevant features of the institutional setup. These features shaped the WKÖ’s social policy attitudes in two ways: first, by ensuring a strong role for small firms, and second, by reducing the vulnerability of the organization to discontented minorities. The findings point to the importance of organizational structures in shaping associational policy preferences.

Populism, Law and Order and the Crimes of the 1%

The article examines the evidence of endemic financial crime in the global financial crisis (GFC), the legal impunity surrounding these crimes and the popular revolt against these abuses in the financial, political and legal systems. This is set against a consideration of the development since the 1970s of a conservative politics championing de-regulation, unfettered markets, welfare cuts and harsh law and order policies. On the one hand, this led to massively increased inequality and concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of the super-rich, effectively placing them above the law, as the GFC revealed. On the other, a greatly enlarged, more punitive criminal justice system was directed at poor and minority communities. Explanations in terms of the rise of penal populism are helpful in explaining these developments, but it is argued they adopt a limited and reductionist view of populism, failing to see the prospects for a progressive populist politics to re-direct political attention to issues of inequality and corporate and white collar criminality.

Local approaches to counter a wider pattern? Urban poverty in Portland, Oregon

A model U.S. city, Portland Oregon's progressive policies are often credited with making it highly livable, with a vibrant urban core. Yet these policies have not protected Portland from broader trends that have increased urban poverty over the past several decades in the U.S., including social welfare cuts and the shift in the economy to the service sector. In terms of poverty dynamics and social policies, we argue that while regional planning and other progressive policies have helped protect Portland from extremely high concentrated poverty present in many large U.S. cities, it has still experienced growing social dislocations associated with national and macro-level social and economic factors. These trends suggest both the possibilities and limits of local policy, regional planning, and activism for ameliorating the deleterious consequences of social welfare retrenchment and franchise capitalism for vulnerable urban populations, and highlight the importance of the broader social policy context and economic change for understanding urban poverty and the experiences of the urban poor.

Welfare Mom as Warrior Mom: Discourse in the 2003 Single Mothers' Protest in Israel

AbstractThis study applies critical discourse analysis to the public discourse in Israel regarding the battle of single mothers against extensive welfare cuts. Using the protest of July 2003 as a case study, the article points to parallels between Israel's neo-liberal welfare discourse and that in the US, but also reveals a competing discourse in Israel that incorporated several basic cultural motifs: motherhood, militarism, Zionism and nationalism. While the latter discourse stresses the importance of motherhood and its contribution to society, the former presents single mothers as dependents living off the country's welfare resources. The discourse analysis shows that despite the seeming legitimacy of motherhood in Israel, especially of the Zionist mother who gives birth to soldiers, the negative imagery applied by the neo-liberal ideology to single mothers who receive allowances succeeded in eroding this legitimacy.

The Knafo Chronicles

In summer 2003, Vicky Knafo marched 125 miles from her desolate development town to the Finance Ministry in Jerusalem to protest welfare cuts for Israel’s single mothers. Single mothers from all parts of Israel joined her. Most of the mothers were Mizrahim—Jews with origins in the Arab and Muslim World. They constitute 50% of Israel’s citizenry. But like the 20% Palestinian Israeli citizens, they are treated as a racinated minority by the ruling 30% Ashkenazim (European Jews of Yiddish-speaking origins). This article consists of diary fragments recording the author's participation in the protest as a single welfare mother, ethnographer, and Mizrahi feminist.