Stefan Kühner

Lingnan University · Department of Sociology and Social Policy

Although relatively young, the configurational approach is now firmly established as part of the methodological toolkit for comparative political economists. While debates about its advantages and limitations are ongoing, there has been a proliferation of different qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) types for moderate-N research designs. Rather...

In a world that is rapidly changing, increasingly connected and uncertain, there is a need to develop a shared applied policy analysis of welfare regimes around the globe. Research in Comparative and Global Social Policy is a series of books that addresses broad questions around how nation states and transnational policy actors manage globally shar...

Over the last 10 years, to no small degree, thanks to the work of the outgoing editors Zoë Irving and Kevin Farnsworth, the Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy (hereafter: the Journal) has positioned itself among the leading outlets for international and comparative social policy research.

This article investigates the unique contribution of specific programme characteristics together with personal stigma, stigmatisation by the public, and claims stigma, to the non-take-up of targeted income support among Hong Kong older adults. Drawing on data from a sample of 3,299 Hong Kong older adults aged 65 or above, we find that between 11-14...

From a socioecological perspective, this study highlights the significance of “context” in school satisfaction research by investigating the role of diverse social contexts in the school satisfaction of children. Using representative primary data from the third wave of the International Survey of Children’s Well-Being (Children’s Worlds), this stu...

Studies on welfare state regimes have been dominated by consideration of rich OECD/European and increasingly East Asian countries/territories, leaving South Asian cases such as Indonesia underexplored. The few existing studies that have explicitly tried to conceptualize the Indonesian welfare regime have resulted in little consensus. To address the...

Drawing on first-hand accounts from those living under the systems, this novel study explores the impact of Australia and New Zealand’s income management policies and asks whether they have caused more harm than good.

This article takes a health assets approach to extract policy lessons for Ghana’s present Child and Family Welfare Policy , introduced in 2014. We examine the role of Ghanaian adolescents’ socioeconomic status and family social capital in their subjective well-being using data obtained from a representative survey of adolescents (aged 13-18 years)...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has created tremendous hazards to people worldwide. Incidence, hospitalization, and mortality rates have varied by individual and regional socioeconomic indicators. However, little is known about the indirect social and economic losses following the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent they have dispropor...

In Hong Kong, as elsewhere across East Asia, few empirical studies have captured the voices of children in their middle years to analyse the determinants of subjective child well-being. To fill this research gap, this article employs data from 1,279 randomly selected Hong Kong children aged from 9 - 14 to investigate the mediating role of social ca...

Recent literature on education and work well recognises the ‘crowding-out perspective’ of how higher education expansion impacts the labour market experience of young people with different educational levels. However, the relationship between the labour market experience and young people’s self-reported happiness remains less well understood. This...

This chapter provides an overview of social policy developments in five South Asian countries, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, from a comparative policy perspective. It sets out by briefly summarising innovations in the key areas of social policy during the regional 'social turn' after the year 2005. A subsequent summary of socia...

This essay summarises the broad contours and key characteristics of the Indian government’s social policy response to the global Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing nationwide lockdown. The principal strategy of the Indian government was to implement a large and at times bewildering array of temporary relief measures by ordinances after adjournment o...

Research into minimum income standards and reference budgets around the world is compared in this illuminating collection from leading academics in the field. From countries with long established research traditions to places where it is relatively new, contributors set out the different aims and objectives of investigations into the minimum needs...

This article examines public attitudes towards two reform options for the defined-contribution (DC) Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme in Hong Kong: (i) increasing MPF contributions; or (ii) introducing a universal pension partly funded by switching MPF contributions to the universal pension. Drawing on a phone survey conducted with 975 active c...

Systematic accounts of East Asian government responses to the ‘limits of productivist regimes’ (Gough, 2004) remain surprisingly rare. This article develops three distinct types of East Asian welfare development, i.e. quantitative, type-specific, and radical, employing set-theoretic methods. It then uses these types to analyse six policy fields, in...

Activation policies which promote and enforce labour market participation continue to proliferate in Europe and constitute the reform blueprint from centre-left to centre-right, as well as for most international organizations. Through an in-depth study of four major reforms in Denmark and France, this book maps how co-existing ideas are mobilised t...

The importance of individuals’ social environment as an explanation for the ‘happiness-income paradox’, but also accounting for the negative relationship between income inequality and subjective well-being in macro-comparative perspective is now widely recognized. At the same time, however, debates are still ongoing about the specific role local co...

In a time of increasing inequality, why has there been a recent surge of support for political parties who promote an anti-welfare message? Using a mixed methods approach and newly released data, this book aims to answer this question and to show possible ways forward for welfare states.

This paper is concerned with the research areas of defamilisation/familisation and adult worker models. It particularly focuses on demonstrating how the study of government pro-employment and decommodification measures for reducing defamilisation and familisation risks faced by women contributes to the examination of the adult worker models. It pre...

Quantitative analysis of the question whether ‘parties still matter’ has largely focused on the dynamics of aggregated expenditure-based dependent variables or protective welfare policies such as unemployment, sickness and family benefits. This article develops a series of pooled time-series cross-section regression specifications predicting change...

This article synthesises the characteristics of social pensions across Asia and evaluates the effect of a new social pension in the Hong Kong SAR, the Old Age Living Allowance (OALA), on poverty alleviation, coverage rates and fiscal sustainability. We found that the effectiveness of the OALA in reducing old‐age poverty was limited, although it has...

The question whether Asian welfare types can be classified as distinctly ‘productivist’ has remained subject to lively debates: in East Asia, the recent implementation of social rights-based public policy innovations – including working family support – as a response to rising inequalities, welfare expectations and accelerating social change has be...

Introduction One of the tenets of the competition state and globalisation efficiency theses has been that the end of Keynesian demand-led policies triggered a convergence of partisan and government policy positions in regard to the market economy, government efficiency and the welfare state. For instance, Cerny (1997; 1999, p 3) saw ‘the recasting...

Welfare states globally have been subjected to reform agendas that have stressed economic competitiveness but how has global competition reshaped welfare states in practice? Providing a new cross-national and international narrative, this book captures the complexity of social policy reform process that has taken place over the past 25 years. Drawi...

This article presents a cross-disciplinary review of state-of-the-art explorations of India’s emerging social policy paradigm during the two recent Centre/Left Congress/United Progressive Alliance (UPA) governments (2004–2009, 2009–2014). In doing so, it revises existing classifications of social policy activity in India by tracing quantitative inp...

This chapter looks at data on the manifestos of political parties across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries to examine how political actors have reframed their perspectives on welfare in light of the intensification of global economic competition since the 1970s. In particular, it focuses on how — and how far —...

Introduction Generally regarded as the main trigger for the ‘welfare modelling business’, Esping-Andersen's (1990) The three worlds of welfare capitalism incidentally also heralded the so-called dependent variable problem within the comparative analysis of the welfare state (henceforth, dependent variable problem). In what has become one of the mos...

Social Policy Review draws together international scholarship at the forefront in addressing concerns that emphasise both the breadth of social policy analysis, and the expanse of issues with which it is engaged. Contributions to this edition focus on the effects of financialisation on services and care provision in adult social care, residential c...

This article draws on recent data provided by the Asian Development Bank’s Social Protection Index and uses Fuzzy Set Ideal Type Analysis to develop ideal types of welfare activity to which 29 countries in Asia and the Pacific can have varying degrees of membership. There is little evidence that the commitment to “productive” and “protective” welfa...

This special issue combines contributions to a series of collaborative workshops and conference symposia of the UK Social Policy Association, the UK Development Studies Association and the Indian Social Policy Network held at the University of Bath (April 26th -27th 2013), the University of Birmingham (November 16th 2013), O.P. Jindal Global Univer...

This article rounds off the themed section by reviewing broader debates within welfare state modelling relevant to Greater China. More specifically, it examines the now well-established literature around the East Asian ‘model’ of welfare, and related debates on the notion of a ‘productive welfare’ model. In so doing, it challenges simplistic classi...

QCA based methods have grown in popularity in recent years. Standing between quantitative and qualitative research, in principle they help balance the breadth of analysis provided by quantitative data with the depth of case study knowledge provided by qualitative analysis. The challenge of mixing depth and breadth has always been a particularly acu...

League tables ranking performance outcomes within or between countries have become commonplace in most policy sectors in recent decades and there are numerous examples to be found in practice. UNICEF's 2007 Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries offered a comprehensive and widely cited comparative analysis of children's well being in 21 of...

This chapter aims to add to the literature on welfare retrenchment by consolidating prospect theoretical, party competition and veto player explanations into one framework of analysis. It tests this framework against comparative historical evidence of four Western European democracies, namely Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands. It suggest...

Introduction Over the course of the last two decades, comparative welfare research has dealt with two puzzles. Initially, it was commonplace that Western European welfare states remained remarkably ‘resilient’ despite major fiscal and socio-economic pressures, globalisation, and frontal assaults by austerity governments (see, eg, Castles, 2004). To...

This edition of Social Policy Review marks the 40th anniversary of a publication from the UK Social Policy Association devoted to presenting an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship. It includes a special Anniversary Preface celebrating the publication's evolution and distinctive contributions. Continuing its reputa...

Several theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around ‘productive welfare’. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kühner 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the welfare states of the Organisati...

Labelled ‘the sick economy of Europe’ during the late 1990s, it was suggested that the semi-sovereign German state and its specific type of corporatist governance was not fit to deal with adjusting its social and economic model adequately to the dual challenges of globalisation and the growing knowledge economy. This perception of Germany has chang...

Introduction: the rise and fall (and rise again?) of the German model To contextualise the German case, it is tempting to draw comparisons with the United Kingdom (UK) as perceptions of these two economic powerhouses of Europe have been locked into something of a Yin and Yang relationship in recent decades. This is particularly so when Germany is v...

This paper presents a series of innovative, pooled time-series, cross-section (TSCS) regression models for 18 OECD countries (1971–2001) to explore the impact of executive ideology alternation and constitutional structures on welfare state change. Unlike other approaches in comparative welfare state research, the models specified in this paper focu...

The question of how best to account for the multidimensional character of welfare states has become an integral part of discussions on the so-called dependent variable problem within comparative welfare state research. In this paper, we discuss challenges from an attempt to capture productive and protective welfare state dimensions by means of seve...

Numerous analysts have suggested that globalization and the emergence of more knowledge-based economies have encouraged high-income nations to shift towards a model of productive welfare focused on social investment, yet typologies of welfare are still largely drawn on the basis of measures of social protection rather than social investment. Here w...

This article examines the policy detail of welfare state reform agendas in two countries in which self-proclaimed ‘Third Way’ governments have been in power – Germany and the United Kingdom – in order to explore the competing influences on social policy of an ostensibly common set of ideas and contrasting institutionalised policy legacies. In so do...

The introduction of innovative macro-measures has been one of the preferred means to account for identified limitations of traditional quantitative approaches in comparative analyses of the welfare state. However, these state-of-the-art indicators are not powerful enough to account for the nuanced politics of ‘welfare state change’ across mature we...