The COVID-19 pandemic triggered historic expansions of the U.S. social safety net to mitigate unprecedented economic hardship. However, increased government spending and program expansions on paper do not automatically translate into equitable access in practice. Following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines, this scoping review synthesizes 33 peer-reviewed studies published between 2020 and 2025 examining access to federal social safety net programs, including food assistance, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and housing and energy assistance. The review identified six categories of barriers to access: racial and ethnic disparities, administrative barriers, policy design barriers, instrumental barriers, geographic and demographic disparities, and COVID-19 specific factors. At the same time, four opportunities were identified that improved access: program expansions, staff and community efforts, convenience of remote services, and Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer (P-EBT). Findings highlight the dual reality of entrenched exclusions and innovative adaptations, underscoring the need for reforms that institutionalize equity and resilience in the social safety net.

People with disability from culturally diverse backgrounds face challenges accessing community services. These negative experiences contribute to everyday harm, a common but less noticeable form of harm that negatively impacts a person's wellbeing and social connections. Despite its impact, the concept of everyday harm is underexplored for this community in service settings. A scoping review was conducted through a systematic search across four databases of Eric/ProQuest, CINAHL, Scopus and Taylor & Francis. Eighteen articles were identified and thematically analysed. Findings revealed that everyday harm is often experienced by people from culturally diverse communities and overlooked by service providers. Three major themes were identified: (1) experiences of everyday harm, (2) responses to it and (3) practices of services to prevent or address everyday harm. Everyday harm experiences are shaped by historic systemic inequality, neglect of cultural responsiveness in services and capacity and awareness of service providers. People experience everyday harm to the combination of the intersecting parts of their identities. The findings imply the need for culturally responsive policy change, rights-based service reform and inclusive empirical research to better understand the steps to prevent or address everyday harm in service settings.

This article examines the trend in fathers' uptake of parental leave following the 2004 parental leave reform in Estonia and analyses the factors that determine whether fathers take leave. The reform introduced generous earnings-related parental leave benefits paid over a long period but did not implement a fathers' quota. The study population includes children born between 2004 and 2018. We use a register-based dataset and logistic regression to analyse variation in the probability that fathers take parental leave. The main explanatory variables are fathers' earnings and educational attainment. Following the reform, fathers' uptake of parental leave more than tripled over the study period. We find a strong positive association between fathers' earnings and their use of parental leave, likely due to the full replacement of previous earnings and the high ceiling on parental leave benefits. Incorporating an interaction between parents' income levels into the regression analysis suggests that economic optimisation plays an important role in fathers' decisions to take leave, while relative resources with the couple also matter. This study expands the geographical scope of research into the determinants of fathers' parental leave use. We find both similarities as well as differences in fathers' leave uptake compared to Nordic countries.

Heteronormative public administration assumes that LGBTQIA+ communities will reflect their heterosexual counterparts. The resulting deficient outreach to vulnerable communities has worsened health disparities, as seen in the 2022 Mpox epidemic, in which gay and bisexual men experienced the highest infection rates. This research applied queer theory to examine social media efforts to eliminate Mpox spread. This study critically assessed 591 social media messages from influencers, non-profits, and government for queer-focused and heteronormative discourse. Findings revealed that most governmental and non-profit accounts failed to augment content for the at-risk audience. Gay and bisexual men had to navigate heteronormative content to locate resources critical to their well-being. Conversely, influencers acted as a public health system through repeated messaging and by supplementing governmental guidance with steps tailored for a queer audience. Influencers' value came from leveraging their lived experiences to challenge discriminatory societal norms, highlighting the crucial role of culturally relevant communication.

In Rotterdam, the Netherlands, grassroots organizers with a forced migration background provide support to recent refugees. These organizers try to sustain the informal character of the work they do, while, at the same time, they seek to institutionalize their organization by entering into collaborative government arrangements that are structured by neoliberal funding instruments. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this article does three things. First, it reveals modes of affectivity in settings in which society and the state are imbricated with neoliberal market-oriented logics. Second, it shows how right-wing populism feeds into fantasies and rituals of statecraft. Third, it demonstrates how refugee support is situated in hybrid and diffuse webs of governance. I argue that competitive tendering as a way of sponsoring and regulating civil society organizations not only supports capitalist and neoliberal ideologies by following the logics of capital but also enables the proliferation of racism and anti-migrant hostility. To demonstrate their “professionalism,” civil society organizations are faced not only with the impossible job of implementing a degree of bureaucracy to show that they are non-bureaucratic, but also that they get to speak the language of capital—that in an extreme right-wing conjuncture becomes easily tangled up with anti-migrant hostility.

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the outsourcing of asylum processing and resettlement from Global North to South. Many of these containment practices retrace the fault lines of more typically thought-of colonial extractive regimes. This article draws on long-term ethnographic research conducted in the Republic of Nauru, the world's smallest island nation, located in the equatorial Pacific. I consider how past toxic regimes give shape to the emergence of contemporary toxicities related to expanding outsourced border regimes. I advance the notion of toxic entanglement to help account for the relational production of damaging extractive sectors. Building on both literal environmental toxicity and the increasingly prevalent popular usage of “toxic” as a descriptor for harmful social relations, I argue that the concept of toxic entanglement—informed by local references to toxicity—allows for a deeper understanding of unevenly distributed risks that migrants and locals face. By attending to toxic entanglements across extractive industries and making visible moments of refusal, we can better amplify future responses to mutually constitutive forms of social oppression.

This article examines how humanitarian management of the dead in the Nagorno–Karabakh conflict constructs deceased soldiers as objects of care, incorporating them into “humanity after life”—a postmortem register of humanitarian concern. Drawing on ethnographic research with families of missing persons and observations of care practices around the war dead in post-war Azerbaijan, I argue that under Azerbaijan's system of mandatory conscription, humanitarian practice can displace ethical and institutional attention from living conscripts in active duty toward the dead, making “humanity” most institutionally actionable through recovery, identification, and burial. I call this posthumous humanity: the process through which dead bodies become an enforceable site of international humanitarian legal recognition and procedural care, even as those same individuals, while alive and as members of the armed forces, were lawfully targetable while participating in hostilities under IHL's principle of distinction. I show how “humanity” functions here as a juridical register distributed through IHL categories and humanitarian practices. The article also challenges the legal-humanitarian category of “children” by tracing how kinship idioms, such as referring to conscripted sons as uşaqlar (“children”), unsettle legal distinctions between protected civilians and combatants. The analysis contributes to anthropological debates on law, kinship, humanitarianism, and the politics of death.

To receive justice in the legal system, one must be seen by the legal system; this is as true for nonhuman animal victims of crime as it is for human victims. Situating animal cruelty within the invisible crimes framework, this paper highlights the paucity of research on prosecutions and sentencing under animal welfare law. Due in part to a lack of transparency in the public and private institutions that regulate animal welfare, our understanding of how animals are recognized within legal systems has so far relied heavily on critiques of animal welfare legislation as written. Drawing on an original database of Australian prosecutions of cruelty cases (n = 552) involving “pet” animals, this paper offers new, empirically centered perspectives on the legal treatment of animals. It calls for an expansion of the invisible crimes framework to include “invisible victims” and supports recent calls for animals to be recognized as crime victims.

How much knowledge do policymakers have about poverty, inequality, and social policy and does that knowledge matter? This study analyzes innovative data from direct (e.g., face-to-face) interviews of 49 California and Texas state legislators. Knowledge is assessed comprehensively with 11 questions and compared against a nationally representative sample of adults. Legislators answered only 42.5% of questions correctly—statistically significantly, but only slightly higher than the general public's 30.9% correct. Less than a tenth of legislators knew the poverty rate, and less than a quarter knew what share of the poor are homeless or the top 5% income threshold. There is also substantial heterogeneity as few answered most questions correctly, but several answered almost all incorrectly, and 14 of 49 performed worse than the general public. We demonstrate that this knowledge is salient because it strongly predicts legislators' voting. We then show key legislative roles, affiliations with stakeholders, and educational or biographical backgrounds do not result in greater knowledge. While legislators report various information sources influencing their thinking in this domain, some cannot cite any source, and sources are unrelated to knowledge. Ultimately, this study demonstrates policymakers' knowledge about poverty, inequality, and social policy is both limited and consequential.

Comparative research on school-to-work transitions (SWT) mainly focused on cross-country differences, while territorial variations among sub-national territories in youth labour market and transitions outcomes have been underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the impact over time of national institutional configurations and regional contextual traits on subnational school-to-work transitions outcomes, combining comparative welfare and SWT research with studies on regional economics. Our findings reveal that SWT evolves conditionally on the interaction between national welfare institutions and regional socio-economic contexts. The analysis identifies regime-specific sensitivity to territorial human capital concentration, with Sub-protective and post-socialist regimes showing greater variability across the human capital distribution, while Employment-centred and Universalistic regimes demonstrate more consistent outcomes.

Front cover illustration: Veterans of Peterloo assembled in support of parliamentary reform at Failsworth (Lancashire) in 1884. Image Ref P7611, courtesy of Oldham Archives, reproduced from Sim Schofield, Short Stories about Failsworth Folk (1905), 65–6.

This introduction makes the case for a fresh approach to the history of extra-parliamentary politics that examines both the practice of political organising and the organisation of political practices. In considering how historians of the long 19th century can move on from the new political history and improve dialogue with those of the 20th century, it builds on a growing interest in what has been termed ‘practical politics’. This means looking at political practices, or the doings – and the not-doings – of politics. Outlining how ‘practice’ has been theorised, the introduction indicates how such a framework enables us both to address the central concerns of political history and to engage with a variety of historical fields. By construing histories of politics as histories of practices, it draws attention to political organising as a particularly valuable area of inquiry. The introduction concludes with an overview of the ten articles that make up this special issue, indicating the range of methodological and theoretical perspectives their authors take.

This article examines surviving manuscript petitions to reveal the material culture of political organisation. Conceptually, the article frames the material culture of petitions and the practices associated with petitioning as a technology that enabled political activity. As studies of the USA have shown, the signatory list served as a mechanism for political recruitment and organisation. Offering a granular study of material petitions demonstrates the importance of the sequencing and spatial patterning of signatory lists to understanding the organisational qualities of petitions. Signatory lists were often headed by local notables, a strategy designed to encourage potential signers to subscribe. A more random distribution of names and addresses indicated that the organisers had left the petition to ‘lie’ at strategically selected sites, while the structuring of names by street implied the use of door-to-door canvassing, which became increasingly common. Finally, the article considers the importance of the material form of petitions to their reception and presentation to authority, particularly the materialisation of the claim to represent a given social or geographic community. Examining materiality and practice therefore provides new perspectives at a time when there is an appetite to move beyond the linguistic approaches associated with the ‘new political history’.

The impact in British Caribbean colonies of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 have been well documented, yet parliamentary intervention in these colonies during the decades between merits further investigation. This article addresses the 1815–16 debates on the failed Slave Registry Bill and the 1824 creation of the Anglican diocese of Barbados and their influence on the associational practices of the island colony. It uses parish, diocesan and voluntary society records from Barbados as well as pamphlets and parliamentary minutes from the metropole to ask why representatives of the colonial government, the new diocese, resident planters and free people of colour saw voluntarist charity as an effective response to the changing political environment of the early 19th century. Moreover, it inquires as to how conflicts within and between these groups laid bare the fissures of white supremacist governance leading up to emancipation. This article suggests that in response to revolt, reform and parochial decline, colonial elites appropriated proslavery redefinitions of notions like ‘humanity’ in organising voluntarist charities simultaneously to meet the expectations of metropolitan sensibilities and to exclude free people of colour from an emergent civil society.

This article considers the roles that the body and the senses played in shaping the dynamics of 19th-century reform crowds in Britain. Acoustics, terrain, timing, weather and corporeal issues of hunger, thirst and calls of nature influenced the timing and location of events and, along with the physical aspects of accessibility, visibility and acoustics, affected attendees’ turnout and stamina to endure extended and distant meetings. The article reveals how probing the somatic – namely, bodily – nature of crowds opens a new perspective on the lived experience of popular politics and the mass platform. The reform movement, in particular, prompted raucous events loaded with an often party-like atmosphere of pomp, symbolism and chaos, which would have triggered a range of physical and sensory feelings in attendees. What the positive aspects of pageantry, ritual and participatory theatrics brought to meetings, the bodily facets of the crowd often countered. Yet while anticipation of discomfort may have deterred some from joining and limited significant female attendance, it did not stifle the wider reputation of the mass platform, which was enhanced by a cacophony of conversation in newspapers and via word-of-mouth. The crowd, in its somatic incarnations, was the embodiment of collective power.

During the early years of the 19th century, a set of conventions gradually developed for how to organise local meetings as part of national controversies. This article applies the concept of ‘forum selection’, generally used by lawyers, to the 1820s campaign against the corn laws to explore how those conventions influenced the decisions that organisers made about which method of organising to employ, together with the consequences that flowed from their decisions. At that time meetings were arranged for defined groups: they were ‘of’ inhabitants, commercial men or individual trades. The identity selected determined the type of meeting convened and who could and might attend, and it also shaped the ways in which their views were articulated. Broad urban support in England for reform of the corn laws made the campaign a good context for organisational innovation, providing new methods that were particularly useful to working people. Exploring forum selection also draws our attention to the important role of local activists in extending the political nation. The 1820s were a lively period of experimentation in extending the practices of organising, soon to be employed to full effect in the agitation over parliamentary reform.

Landscape and space were important to how radicals and reformers in the early 19th century organised public and protest events. However, landscape has often not been considered to play an active role in the organisation of such occasions. This article uses St Peter's Field and Peterloo as a case study to demonstrate how landscape's agency influenced the organisation of radical politics in Manchester through using a map progression from 1800 to 1836. Part of landscape's role is how it connects to memory, which can be as much about forgetting as remembering. This work sits within the interdisciplinary field of historical archaeology, drawing upon archaeological theories on landscape, space and materiality. The framework of palimpsests is used to examine how landscape is in constant flux, being built, modified, destroyed and built again in order to demonstrate how processes of urbanisation, industrialisation and memory-making shaped how radicals and reformers in Manchester could organise their politics.

As a carrier of influence and governance that stands distinct from parliamentary and municipal representation, civil society has been ascribed a particular layer of criticality in the Scottish example of the stateless nation. This article examines the voting choices made at the 1852 general election by those active within Edinburgh's voluntary associations. The evidence is generated by linking subscription lists to the city's published pollbook. Set against the dominance of the Liberal vote in Scotland's urban constituencies, this research uncovers the depth of Conservative support amongst those most active in associational life. The results offer insight into the extent that associational activity projected Conservative political hegemony and questions the liberalising trajectory of civil society.

This article focuses on a relatively understudied group within modern British political history, the professional constituency agents of the Liberal and Conservative parties, who made a crucial contribution to the workings of party organisation and the operation of the representative system between 1880 and 1914. Reflecting the recent historiographical emphasis on studying everyday political practices, it examines the activities of agents in English constituencies between elections, assessing how they became embedded in local life not only through party organisational work such as registration and political education, but also in a variety of other public roles. It discusses how the agents’ often surprisingly humble backgrounds could help them to be more in touch with ordinary voters than MPs or other leading politicians were. It also explores the agents’ professional bodies and their perennial struggles to improve the status of this profession. These status anxieties illuminate not only the diversity of constituency organisation, but also the lived experiences of this key group of political activists. Rather than seeing party agents as set apart from ‘the people’, this article argues that their activities need to be integrated into the wider history of British political culture.

This article examines approaches to the history of 19th-century politics in Britain and Ireland in order to propose fruitful directions for further debate. It argues that historians should return to a more holistic view of the practices of political action and democratisation, reframing the divide between social movements, parties and popular politics through a focus on organising. We propose a shift from foregrounding franchise extension as the principal narrative of the 19th century and to focus instead on forms of organising political participation as means of asserting and developing practices of popular sovereignty throughout the period. Recipes – rather than repertoires – offer a metaphor for variety and change in the ingredients and environments for organising. This article emphasises a comparative and global framework for understanding practices of politics, including organising, in the British Isles.

This article considers the political lecture tour, and particularly the travelling socialist caravan tours organised by Clarion socialists at the end of the 19th century, to argue that, for socialist lecturers, touring produced everyday experiences of comradery, cross-cultural connection and deliberative forms of hospitality that could powerfully embody socialist ideas for new audiences. The article shows that by looking to intimate encounters on the road – be that the sharing of meals or bedrooms, suffering misfortune with a stranger, meeting family members or making friends – we might tell a different story of the development and organisation of socialist ideas in late-Victorian Britain. Crucially, it suggests that by looking to the intimate, unceremonial and happenstance meetings that characterised socialist lecture tours, we can conceive of itinerant activists not just as messengers or organisers, but also as producers of the everyday forms of cross-cultural connection and provincial internationalisms that would prove transformative to the development of socialist thought in Britain.

This article explores how English women's intervention in the Irish suffrage movement was both a help and a hindrance to Irish women. On the one hand, it caused political animosity and division, because many Irish suffrage campaigners feared a subsumption into the larger British movement. On the other hand, Irish women recognised that the links between English and Irish groups helped them maintain pressure on the British parliament, connecting them to the wider British movement. This article looks beyond the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) to account for the political and social diversity and intricacies of the wider suffrage movement in both nations. In doing so, it seeks to understand how political ideologies, national identities and personal friendships were built in the early 20th century. This article shows how imperial feminism permeated the organising of many English societies in Ireland, even those run by socialists who supported the principle of home rule for Ireland. Yet imperial assumptions and attitudes did not entirely eliminate opportunities for solidarity across the Irish sea. This article therefore also examines the ways in which close working relationships were created and sustained, and even provided the basis for future collaborations between English and Irish political activists.

Given the high concentration of ethnic and cultural diversity in Italy, various national policies have been implemented to foster migrant integration. However, local authorities play a crucial role, as they are directly responsible for translating policy frameworks into concrete practices and mediating between institutions, families and communities. This study employed a mixed-methods design, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, to examine how 86 local administrators (80.23% female; M _age = 48.27 years, SD_age = 11.48, range: 25–71) from different municipalities in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy perceived and managed issues related to migrant integration within their local contexts. Findings revealed that administrators generally perceived diversity as a resource and actively promoted integration through education and community engagement initiatives. Persistent challenges included limited political participation and structural constraints in youth-focused policies, highlighting the need for more sustainable, coordinated and inclusive approaches. These insights emphasize that systematically monitoring and comparing local practices is essential for designing responsive, evidence-based integration policies that produce meaningful outcomes for diverse communities.

The sub-field of public encounters has significant untapped potential to advance the study and practice of citizen-state relationships. The main aim of this special issue is to put the spotlight on this growing literature on relational dynamics between citizens and agents of the state. In this editorial introduction, we synthesise emerging empirical and conceptual insights across the special issue articles and wider literature to explain the profound real-world impact of public encounters and highlight the added value of public encounters as an analytical lens. We identify three cross-cutting avenues for studying public encounters: recognising recurrent encounters, clarifying relational dynamics, and recasting politics, power, and emotion. We make the case that extant scholarship can no longer afford to keep ignoring or eliding public encounters. By highlighting the practical and conceptual significance of public encounters, this editorial contributes to developing an interdisciplinary agenda for studying and improving citizen-state relationships.

In April 2014, then-President Barack Obama announced an initiative to grant clemency to thousands of federal prisoners serving long sentences for non-violent crimes, targeting a reduction in racial disparities in drug-crime sentences. Critiques of the initiative's implementation abound, but 1715 people ultimately received clemency—more than under any previous president. We investigate Obama Clemency Initiative outcomes, focusing on the total pool of clemency applicants. Using clemency applicant data from the Office of the Pardon Attorney combined with “inmate locator” data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, we construct a dataset of the 20,464 individuals who applied for clemency and had their petitions reviewed during Obama's presidency. After the Initiative was announced, overall demographic patterns of reviewed applicants shifted, becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race and age (but not sex). Notably, the proportion of White petitioners who applied for and received clemency more than doubled, while the proportion of Black petitioners who applied for and received clemency declined, suggesting that the Initiative's aims of equity were not fully realized across racial groups. We consider the theoretical implications of these patterns for understanding the role of clemency in the legal system and its potential as a tool of policy reform.

Contemporary criminal justice systems have increasingly prioritized efficiency as a key guiding principle in their institutional processes. This research examines the role of defense counsel to analyze whether and how lawyers strategically adapt their advocacy methods as they balance the demands of procedural efficiency with their professional ethical duty to safeguard defendants' rights and interests. Drawing on participant observations and interviews with defense counsel in the People's Republic of China (China), our findings manifest a widely held professional tenet among Chinese lawyers – ‘early defense is the best defense’. In short, optimal advocacy is contingent upon timely and tactical involvement at the pre-trial stage. As police and procuratorates assume greater discretionary power in shaping case resolutions, the capacity of defense counsel to intervene promptly and effectively during the investigatory and prosecutorial processes is critical in ensuring favorable outcomes for defendants. Yet, this strategic advantage gradually diminishes as the case progresses into the formal adjudication phase. At both trial and appellate levels, defense counsel face significant limitations in their power to persuade judicial authorities to overturn prior decisions made by their institutional counterparts.

This co-authored essay builds on a growing anthropological literature that engages critically and creatively with idealized official and popular ideas about documents of/in migration regimes. Documents are often championed as a common and unquestionable good in transnational migration but they are intrinsically tied to inequalities and exclusions. As such they can be the source of hope for migrants, but are frequently also the source of violence, normative judgement, and control by a range of state and non-state actors. In conversation with Nicole Constable's book, Passport Entanglements, this essay draws on the ethnographic research of its six co-authors to discuss the shifting temporalities and scales of documents in their encounters with people. From aspal (“real but fake”) passports to well-meaning international NGOs and profit driven brokers, we review the bureaucratic infrastructures of mobility controls that produce varying degrees and kinds of violence, exploitation, and vulnerability for differently situated people. Engaging with these shifting temporalities and multiple scales of documents, we argue that documents not only help or hinder people's mobility but are themselves in motion through significant relations.

The relationship between public administrations and civil society has always been considered one of the nodes on which the quality of democratic living depends. An important part of this relationship is determined by so-called public encounters, that is, the multiplicity of contacts and interactions between public personnel and citizens. In recent decades, participatory deliberative processes have generated new public encounters, whereby ordinary citizens and stakeholders discuss public problems with public professionals, share information and viewpoints, and try to find feasible and reasonable solutions. The critical literature on deliberative processes warns of the risk of the interactions between citizens and public personnel contributing to depoliticisation mechanisms, thereby transforming what should be a creative process into a constrained process that inhibits conflict and manipulates citizens. The aim of this article is to test the thesis of the depoliticising effect of deliberative processes by presenting the findings of an empirical analysis of public encounters in deliberative processes. The research reveals that the reality is far more multi-faceted than how the critical debate depicts it: the degree of depoliticisation is not constant, and it in fact fluctuates during the various stages of the deliberative process; simultaneously, elements of indirect repoliticisation emerge. These findings have prompted us to question the pessimistic view of critical scholars and to propose a partial reframing of the concept. The findings also confirm the usefulness of using public encounters as fundamental analysis units to better understand the development and dynamics of deliberative processes over time.

Street-level bureaucracy research argues that the local community shapes policy implementation. Yet, little is known about the impact of local political preferences on welfare policy application. This study extends this line of research examining how local political preferences in East Germany are linked to job centres' delivery of active labour market programmes—sanctions, workfare programmes, wage subsidies, and training programmes. Additionally, we assess whether local political preferences are related to welfare recipients' chances of labour market re-integration. We apply a fixed-effects approach to local elections data linked with job-centre-level registry data on welfare recipients. Our results suggest that left-wing and right-wing parties generally adhere to distinct welfare policy approaches, with higher far-left party vote shares being associated with fewer restrictive policies and higher vote shares for the Right with more employment uptake. Overall, the results suggest an important role of local political preferences in shaping welfare policy implementation through political and organisational steering.

As many other affluent welfare states, Belgium experienced no structural decline in relative income poverty among the working-age population during the three decades preceding the pandemic. Since the late-1980s, relative income poverty stagnated or even increased, despite favourable trends such as rising employment rates, growing household incomes, and substantial social spending. This was the case in all the three regions of the country, but particularly so in Brussels and Wallonia. Using a shift-share counterfactual analysis, this study investigates to what extent long-term socio-demographic changes—particularly the rise in single-adult, dual-earner households, and migration—might explain the stagnation in working-age income poverty during a period when welfare states shifted towards activation and social investment. The findings indicate that socio-demographic changes had only a limited theoretical effect on poverty. In Flanders, the growing share of two-earner families compensated for the increase in the share of single and lone parent families. In contrast, this compensatory dynamic was absent in Wallonia, partially explaining the notable rise in working-age relative income poverty in this specific region. Migration had a poverty-increasing effect across all regions, especially in Brussels, where non-nationals increased sharply. Overall, these results suggest that socio-demographic shifts cannot fully account for the stagnation in working-age poverty. The study shows that disappointing poverty trends cannot be explained by demographic developments, and that the link between poverty and tax–benefit models is more complex than often assumed. Therefore, country-level analyses may obscure important subnational variations and lead to misinterpretations in cross-national comparisons.

This article introduces a kinship anthropology of policing framework to analyze the complexities and contestedness of police reform trajectories. Kinship is approached in a processual sense, made through practices and performances, and I contend that police officers act as a kin-like group who engage in kinning. In turn, police reform trajectories and oversight practices are geared towards dekinning and the disruption of kin-like groups to implement change. Yet, I argue that oversight practices also occur within the realm of kin due to the ambiguities of kinship. By approaching policing through the lens of kinship, I show how relations of loyalty and belonging are not merely institutional effects, but forms of relatedness actively produced through everyday practices of kinning and dekinning. To exemplify this, I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kenya between 2017 and 2018 and problematize the internal-external oversight dichotomy prevalent in oversight studies. This paper contributes to anthropology of policing scholarship, and specifically anthropologists working on police reform and oversight.

Low fertility and population ageing have prompted renewed attention to pronatalist social policy, yet evidence on its effectiveness in East Asia remains limited. This article investigates the impact of pronatalist policy interventions on childbearing intentions in China, using a factorial survey experiment conducted in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, emblematic of the country's demographic crisis. We examine three policy domains, including decommodification, defamilisation, and degenderisation, alongside context-specific familisation risks. A core contribution is a gendered interaction analysis revealing that women and men respond to fundamentally different policy logics. Women's intentions are most positively shaped by decommodification measures that provide direct financial compensation for care work, directly offsetting the motherhood penalty. In stark contrast, men's responsiveness is contingent on structural security (notably housing), a prerequisite for engaging with family policies, while they remain largely insensitive to marginal financial incentives. Beyond this gendered dichotomy, we find that while public childcare expansion paradoxically reduced intentions—likely reflecting quality concerns—universal work-life balance and gender equality measures proved effective for both genders. Furthermore, the strong positive effects of intergenerational support and homeownership highlight the critical role of ‘supported familisation’ in the Chinese context. The study concludes that effective pronatalist strategies must move beyond ‘one-size-fits-all’ instruments to explicitly synchronise resource substitution for women with structural security for men, underpinned by universal measures to degenderise time.

While existing research has primarily examined whether individuals accept or reject basic income schemes in Europe and North America, this study explores a broader range of attitudes among young adults towards basic income schemes in Korea. This study utilises the five features of basic income defined by the Basic Income Earth Network and identifies favoured and disfavoured conditions of basic income. The vignette-based survey targets the respondents who had firsthand experience of receiving Youth Basic Income in Gyeonggi Province, as well as those without such experience. A conjoint analysis reveals mixed attitudes among young adults for the basic income attributes and their alternatives. Specifically, unconditionality consistently receive less favourable evaluations, even among respondents with prior experience. Also, direct exposure to the programme does not produce a generalised increase in support for basic income, but selectively shapes evaluations of design features. These findings may contribute to the ongoing discussion on basic income programme design and the influences of institutions.

How does a crisis influence decision-making in public organisations? Crisis decision-making, by definition, occurs under conditions of uncertainty, urgency and high stakes. While high stakes are an inherent feature of any crisis, this article argues that the level of stakes varies, and shapes the decision-making approach. The literature on crisis decision-making highlights two key dimensions: a spectrum from principled to pragmatic approaches, and a range from centralised to decentralised decision-making. Based on survey data from Danish local government managers, the article finds that COVID-19 decision-making was more principled and centralised among managers working in high-stakes policy areas and among those more actively engaged in a central crisis management team. The article theorises and empirically tests how variation in perceived stakes influences crisis decision-making approaches.

Socioeconomic developments in high-income countries since the postwar era have induced fundamental changes in the predominant social risks to which people are exposed. This article seeks to determine whether this evolution is accompanied by changing expectations of the welfare state. It examines how family exposure to social risks as people come of age influences redistributive preferences later in life, and how aggregate shifts in social risk exposure across birth cohorts may correspond to intergenerational change in preferences. Age-period-cohort analyses using retrospective life-history and time series data reveal how support for spending on retirement, unemployment benefits, childcare, and social aid have developed across people born between 1918 and 1991 and participating in the Swiss Household Panel. Early-life exposure to social risks in the household is associated with high support for social spending, and individuals may durably support the welfare domains that best cover the type of risk their family experienced. An increase in new social risk exposure across birth cohorts is correlated with a weak intergenerational preference change. The study sheds light on how material conditions during the formative years may socialise individuals towards durable welfare attitudes, and opens a research agenda for studying welfare state expectations in the long run.

Public participation often falls short of creating more legitimate and inclusive policies that address local needs. The literature highlights three main legitimacy criteria: agreements on who holds power to decide what and how, inclusivity of the process and its representativeness. These criteria are typically viewed as matters of design and participant selection. This paper contends that the quality and legitimacy of public participation depend not only on design, but on what happens ‘in-between’ strategic decisions. It uses public encounters to study the ‘in-between’ of participation meetings, where relational qualities—emotions, memories and meaning making—shape power dynamics among citizens and public professionals. An ethnographic case study analyses the ‘in-between’ of public encounters in a participatory process in Amsterdam. The study makes three contributions. First, it reveals that the ‘in-between’ not only shapes relational qualities within, but also across subsequent public encounters. This insight suggests that public encounter research should adopt a longitudinal perspective to understand the impact of the ‘in-between’ and advocates for a more cyclical approach to studying emotions in public policy. Second, the paper shows that structural inequality between citizens and public professionals exists not only in the design of participation but also extends through the relational process across ‘in-betweens’. This suggests that research on public participation should be attentive to the first public encounter, as it establishes the relational dynamics that shape the process. Third, critical studies of public encounters and public participation should look beyond public encounters and include encounters that occur among professionals in their behind-the-scenes meetings.

Research on social policy and solidarity often highlights disability as a paradigmatic case of a ‘deserving’ group that warrants social support. However, this hierarchical view of solidarity frequently ignores the role of solidarity in the lived experiences and everyday practices of disabled people themselves. Against the growing hopes of the disability movement and the social model of disability for a shared, cross-disability identity and solidarity, this study examines how ‘lay’ disabled individuals experience and engage in acts of horizontal solidarity with one another. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 18 Israeli disabled persons revealed four main themes: the spectrum of disability identities, the glue of disability identity, the facilitating factors shaping disability identity and acts of solidarity. These themes illustrate the diverse, complex and sometimes conflicting ways that solidarity is understood and practiced within the disability community.

Promoting the joint construction and sharing of urban public services is of great significance in breaking down the barriers of registered residence and improving the employment quality of the floating population. This study empirically examines how urban public services shape the quality of employment among the floating population, employing dynamic monitoring survey microdata alongside a comprehensive urban public service index at the city level. Our findings reveal that enhanced urban public services are significantly associated with improved employment quality, a result that endures across a battery of robustness tests. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that the positive influence of urban public services is primarily transmitted through two channels: the aggregation of countrymen—which fosters social capital and facilitates labour market information exchange—and the development of intensive labour markets that catalyse innovation and elevate job matching efficiency. Notably, local fiscal pressures are found to mitigate these beneficial effects. Further heterogeneity analysis indicates that the impact of urban public services is asymmetric: the enhancement of employment quality is particularly pronounced among individual migrants, family groups migrating with couples and children, inter-provincial migrants and those opting to work in larger urban centres. These empirical insights contribute a vital theoretical foundation and robust evidence base for optimising the allocation of urban public service resources, thereby promoting social integration and sustainable, high-quality employment within rapidly urbanising human settlements.

This paper explores the distinctive dynamics of entitlement versus non-entitlement social programmes, focusing on how this distinction influences frontline workers' management of access to social provisions. While much of the existing literature emphasises the macro-level impacts of these alternative policy designs, this study focuses on their operational dimensions by examining how frontline workers steer users' access in each type of programme. Drawing on qualitative interviews with social workers in Israel, the findings reveal how this foundational design choice creates two starkly different operational contexts that, in turn, determine the nature of frontline discretion. By ensuring that resources meet demand, the entitlement framework creates conditions that allow for professional discretion aimed at upholding statutory rights. In contrast, the non-entitlement context is defined by fixed resource limits that generate inherent competition and uncertainty, which in turn compels frontline workers to develop rationing discretion. This shifts significant distributive decision-making from policymakers to the frontline, placing workers in a contradictory role as both advocates and rationers and intensifying disparities in access. The paper contributes to the literature on street-level bureaucracy and benefit take-up by demonstrating how a top-down feature of policy design fundamentally shapes the nature of frontline work and the realisation of social rights.

This paper focuses on how street-level bureaucrats understand and manage information in their interactions with clients in the context of so-called open-book services, where digital tools make it possible for clients to easily access documentation conventionally viewed as internal work material for professionals' eyes only. Through a qualitative interview study of Swedish doctors regarding the national Patient Accessible Electronic Health Record, we examine how open-book services and associated automation of information provision to clients can affect street-level bureaucrats' information practices. We demonstrate how doctors express concern about patients misinterpreting medical information and suggest creating separate records for patient use. Despite the availability of digital tools, traditional information pathways remain preferred by doctors. Moreover, the contextual character of potential efficiency gains is examined, insofar as open-book services are associated with these policy discourses. Building on our results, we propose and develop the concept of contextual layering to capture the challenge of creating documentation that simultaneously serves both professional and client information needs without compromising either. We conclude by highlighting the need for policymakers to consider the implications of automation and digitalization for information handling and the roles of street-level bureaucrats in order to ensure their support.

Theoretically grounded in Public Service Logic (PSL), this study investigates frontline care staff's experiences with value-creation negotiations across residential transition processes for service users with intellectual disabilities to and within co-located supported housing in a Norwegian municipal setting. Through a qualitative case study based on 11 in-depth interviews and two focus group interviews, three themes: independence—dependency, self-determination—family power, and home—workplace were developed, along with the concept of tension lines of value co-creation. The findings illustrate that frontline care staff frequently face divergent values, grapple with the question of value-for-whom, and make concessions across the individual elements.

Verbal communication between bureaucrats and citizens crucially determines the dynamics and outcomes of public encounters. However, so far, scholars have not sought to quantitively measure it, which limits our knowledge of the role language plays in shaping interactions between bureaucrats and clients. Addressing this gap, we develop and systematically validate computational linguistic measures of complexity and emotionality as two foundational dimensions along which bureaucratic communication varies. We thereby rely on a novel speech-data set of 154 conversations between frontline bureaucrats and citizens, recorded at four local agencies in Germany. Content validation shows that the two measures serve to accurately capture these two concepts, whilst convergent validation yields that they conform with two alternative measures. Finally, construct validation is established by showing that they generate theoretically plausible results. The paper contributes to the literature by innovating the methodical approaches for analysing the language used during bureaucrat-client interactions. It thereby paves the way for advancing our understanding of the manifold ways in which these interactions affect the administrative treatment and outcomes citizens experience.