While comparative politics has been dominated by macro-approaches, relatively little comparative scholarship has focused on understanding the behavior of individuals. However, recent years have seen increased attention to integrating what we know about individual citizens with what we know about...

In this paper social assistance developments are analyzed in a large number of EU member states, including European transition countries and the new democracies of southern Europe. The empirical analysis is based on the unique and recently established SaMip Dataset, which provides social...

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study, we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty...

Although many have expressed concern over whether generous welfare policies discourage the employment of single mothers, scholars have rarely exploited cross-national variability in the generosity of social policies to assess this question. This is the case even though much previous scholarship...

Cross-national studies of the impact of welfare states on gender inequality tend to overlook socioeconomic divisions among women. This paper challenges the implicit assumption that welfare states have uniform effects on the labour market attainments of all women, arguing that the impact of state...

This paper assesses women's poverty in 26 diverse LIS countries - five Anglophone countries, six Continental European countries, four Nordic countries, two Eastern European countries, three Southern European countries, and six Latin American countries. Our analyses are organized around four...

With a view to better assessment of the roles played by social security and social policy in determining well-being, this presentation introduces the 'decommodified security ratio' (DSR), an instrument for evaluating an important duty of the social State, namely to maintain and improve people's...

A common assumption in political economy is that voters are self-regarding maximizers of material goods, choosing their preferred level of social spending accordingly. In contrast, students of American social policy have emphasized the key role of an other-regarding motive that makes support for...