Throughout the world, politicians from all the main parties are cutting back on state welfare provision, encouraging people to use the private sector instead and developing increasingly stringent techniques for the surveillance of the poor. Almost all experts agree that we are likely to see further constraints on state welfare in the 21st Century.

Gathering together the findings from up-to-date attitude surveys in Europe East and West, the US and Australasia, this revealing book shows that, contrary to the claims of many experts and policy-makers, the welfare state is still highly...

Analyzing Inequality summarizes key issues in today's theoretically guided empirical research on social inequality, life course, and cross-national comparative sociology. It describes the progress made in terms of data sources, both cross-sectional and longitudinal; the new instruments that make inequality research possible; new ways of thinking and explaining; and empirical findings or important contributions of rigorous empirical research to our understanding. The chapters, each written by a distinguished social scientist, are of interest to both scholars and students. This is the...

This book surveys whether and how social classes differ in their views on important social issues, such as work and family, the economy and politics, rights and morals, and the distribution of justice. What accounts for such differences in opinion? Are class differences comparable and consistent across different nations? Do class differences change over time? In The Moral Economy of Class, Stefan Svallfors builds on data from large-scale comparative surveys to paint a picture of these class differences. Comparing the United States, Britain, Germany, and Sweden, he shows that class...

A comparative analysis of the political attitudes, values, aspirations, and identities of citizens in advanced industrial societies, this book focuses on the different ways in which social policies and national politics affect personal opinions on justice, political responsibility, and the overall trustworthiness of politicians. How have socio-political orientations changed in recent years? How do national institutions impact people's attitudes and values? Is there a correlation between orientations and changing social stratification patterns? How are attitudes translated into action under...

European Welfare Production is of interest to researchers in quality of life research, economists and political scientists interested in welfare regimes and comparative social welfare research, and administrators in social planning and social work.

The aim of this book is to identify the variation in welfare regimes (distribution of responsibilities for welfare delivery between the labour market, the family and the welfare state) and the corresponding welfare outcome at the micro level. The research agenda of this report sets out from the tradition of the "social...