Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
The analysis of the introduction of fiscal welfare in two non-liberal welfare states, France and Sweden, confirms many of the findings or intuitions found in the existing literature regarding the uses and effects of the tax benefit instrument, which validates the idea that there are specific properties attached to this instrument.
The introduction lays out the main themes addressed, the originality of the approach (using fiscal welfare as an analytical lens and tying together a discussion of the social division of welfare and the social division of labour that the use of fiscal welfare entails) and the main contributions of the book. It highlights that, besides developing an original framework based on an understudied policy instrument, the analysis covers both the politics of fiscal welfare and its consequences. In doing so, it engages with the literature on welfare reform and transformation, notably in the field of care provision. It also engages with the literature on labour market polarisation and dualisation. In highlighting the multiple forms of inequalities that are produced through the policies studied, careful attention is given to the gendered, class and ethnic dimensions of these inequalities.
Fiscal welfare (or social tax expenditures) is a policy instrument associated with Liberal welfare states that has been on the rise across many European welfare states.
This book sheds light on the use and effects of fiscal welfare in France and Sweden. Focusing on the introduction of a 50% tax deduction on domiciliary care and household services, it explores the politics behind this scheme, its effects on care provision as well as on labour market dualisation, highlighting how fiscal welfare contributes to structuring both a social division of welfare and a social division of labour.
This ground-breaking book opens a new field of research by exploring fiscal welfare, the political uses of this policy instrument, the patterns of inequalities it gives rise to and its policy feedback effects.
This chapter focuses on the politics of fiscal welfare. The 50 per cent tax reduction on domiciliary care and household services was introduced in 1991 in France and in 2007 in Sweden, though the first debates regarding the introduction of such a tax benefit in Sweden had begun in the early 1990s. The chapter analyses the different stages of adoption and reform of this policy over time, the motivations put forward and the framing of these motivations, the actors that have mobilised and the partisan politics behind this policy scheme. It also looks at the evolution in cost and visibility of this tax instrument and the political and public debates it has sparked. It highlights that a similar temporality has emerged across France and Sweden, in terms of the periods when the choice of instrument was considered and/or implemented and expanded and the type of accompanying discourse. The motivations put forward in both countries also share strong similarities, not least that the schemes were intended to respond to a multiplicity of objectives, of which job creation and addressing of eldercare needs have been the most important.
This chapter examines the impact of the tax benefit instrument on labour market transformation. In particular, it shows how this policy scheme has contributed to the specific patterns of polarisation of the occupational structure that have been observed in both France and Sweden, but also to the dualisation of the labour market, by fostering the development of atypical and precarious working conditions in this sector. Crucial to understanding this process of dualisation are: the rationale for choosing this policy instrument – which subsidises the demand (private households) rather than the supply (care and household workers); the political and normative discourse framing both this tax benefit scheme and the care and household services sector; and the link between this scheme and the activation turn in social and labour market policy. This chapter thus shows how this fiscal welfare scheme actively contributes to fostering a social division of labour, which also intersects with the social division of welfare, and to the sharpening of social inequalities along gender, class and ethnic lines.
This chapter looks at the role of fiscal welfare in the process of transformation and quiet privatisation of care provision, showing how the tax instrument has been justified and legitimised in France and Sweden in the name of promoting ‘free choice’, which modifies the norms for public action with a shift towards a more individual rather than a collective response to care needs. The tax benefit scheme has also accompanied an opening up of care provision to the market and the development of an increasingly powerful private sector with a vested interest in maintaining and expanding this tax scheme. The chapter also examines the distributive consequences of the introduction of this fiscal welfare benefit, showing how it contributes to the co-existence of different forms of access to care and inequalities in access to care, thus leading to a social division of welfare.
This book uses the lens of fiscal welfare to analyse the transformation and development of inequalities in welfare provision and in the social division of labour. In order to better understand the relevance of this lens and to highlight some of the specificities of the instrument, this chapter provides a state of the art of the (essentially Anglo-American) literature on fiscal welfare and social tax expenditures. The chapter also identifies the main research questions addressed in the book and presents an analytical framework, the originality of which is to tie together the analysis of intersecting sources of inequalities and forms of polarisation, showing not only how fiscal welfare has an impact on the social division of welfare – which has been the focus of the fiscal welfare literature – but also how it underpins a social division of labour.
This chapter questions the uses and policy feedback effects of the policy instrument. While the analysis in previous chapters points to some of the negative consequences of this tax benefit scheme, in terms of inequalities in access to care and household services and the effects on public care provision, or in terms of the development of a precarious labour market segment, the scheme could still be considered efficient from a public policy perspective if it achieves some of the aims officially pursued. However, policy evaluations by public agencies and other scholars cast doubt on this while pointing also to the high cost of these schemes for public finances and to the targeting inefficiencies. Such critiques are not entirely new, but have been raised by different public reports at various stages of the introduction and development of the tax benefit scheme in both France and Sweden. This raises the question of the choice to use this policy instrument and why these policy schemes have not only remained in place but have even been extended over the years. This, in turn, helps address the question of the specific properties of the tax benefit instrument and the specific feedback effects of this instrument.
This chapter examines the reconfiguration of social security and employment policy and governance under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat Coalition that took up office in June 2010 and the first year in office of its successor Conservative Government. A commitment to pursue expansive activation remained, but in a context of self-imposed austerity a hard-edged class politics of domination moved centre stage, with economic order concerns regarding social cohesion deprioritised. Increased job-search requirements, short-term employment schemes to test availability for work and increased sanctioning ramped up the threat of exclusion from state support for failing to comply with work related activity requirements (Grover, 2012).
Augmenting this was retrenchment in the value of social security benefits, leaving a threadbare system of residualised assistance, justified through deployment of a regressive two-nation governing strategy that depicted claimants as feckless (Morrison, 2019). Revision to managerialist targets and development of a new quasi-market, meanwhile, reworked the state apparatus, completing the moves initiated under the preceding Labour Government to strengthen direction of (para) state employees and mainstream activation of non-employed claimants (Wiggan, 2015a). Together this marked a pivot back to priortisation of an offensive class politics, with the shift to a regressive market-liberal orientation in labour market policy and governance positioned as the necessary precursor for restoring business profitabilitiy and economic growth.
This chapter summarises the co-constitution of the class and economic order politics of successive governments, their movement between defensive, consolidatory and offensive steps in class struggle, and changes in the orientation of labour market policy and governance. In addition, a brief reflection on social security and employment policy under the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak is provided that points to policy continuity. Throughout 2022–23 the Conservative Government responded to the political recomposition of labour and resurgent labour autonomy by enacting further restrictions on trade union activity, deepening a regressive two nations mode of leadership and renewing the offensive against claimants by once again turning to the threat of exclusion as the means to activate non-employed claimants, and low- waged recipients of Universal Credit (and their partners where relevant) in order to expand the labour power being brought to market. The form of activation that began to be signalled during the late 1980s and whose development was understood by Aufheben (1998), to be focused on curtailing claimant autonomy, has persisted, and in 2023 remains dominant in what remains conceptualised here as a regressive market-liberal orientation in labour market policy and governance.
