The main aim of this paper is to examine the fairness of different ways of holding people responsible for healthcare-related choices. Our focus is on conceptualisations of responsibility that involve blame and sanctions, and our analytical approach is to provide a systematic discussion based on interrelated and successive health-related, lifestyle choices of an individual. We assess the already established risk-sharing, backward-looking and forward-looking views on responsibility according to a variety of standard objections. In conclusion, all of the proposed views on holding people responsible for their lifestyle choices are subjected to reasonable critiques, although the risk-sharing view fare considerably better than the others overall considered. With our analytical approach, we are able to identify how basic conditions for responsibility ascription alter along a time axis. Repeated relapses with respect to healthcare associated with persistent, unhealthy lifestyle choices, call for distinct attention. In such situations, contextualised reasoning and transparent policy-making, rather than opaque clinical judgements, are required as steps towards fair allocation of healthcare resources.

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Our results suggest that people's decision about whether to vaccinate and thus contribute to herd immunity is influenced by concern for others. Thus, stressing the collective benefits of vaccination could increase the effectiveness of health campaigns.

A widespread cultural phenomenon – and/or individual disposition – is the idea that one should never try to be more, try to be different, or consider oneself more valuable than other people. In Scandinavia this code of modesty is referred to as the ‘Jante mentality’, in Anglo-Saxon societies the ‘tall poppy syndrome’, and in Asian cultures ‘the nail that stands out gets hammered down’. The study reported here examines how this modesty code relates to generalized trust. We argue, prima facie, that a positive and a negative relationship are equally plausible. Representative samples of the Norwegian population were asked about their agreement with the Jante mentality and the extent to which they have trust in other people. Two population surveys were conducted; one measuring individual level associations and another measuring aggregate level associations. It was found that the relationship between having a Jante mentality and trust is negative, at both levels of analysis and, furthermore, that the Jante mentality – this modesty code assumed to be instilled in Scandinavians from early childhood – is a powerful predictor of generalized trust.

We examine whether intra-EU migration affects welfare chauvinistic attitudes, i.e. the idea that immigrants’ access to the welfare system should be restricted. According to the in-group/out-group theory, migration can unleash feelings of insecurity and thus trigger welfare chauvinism. According to intergroup contact theory, welfare chauvinism should decrease when immigration is higher, because contact reduces prejudice and softens anti-immigrant stances. We test these theories using data from the European Social Survey 2008/2009, supplemented with country-level data, and analyse these data using a multilevel ordered logit approach. We find a negative relation between intra-EU immigration and welfare chauvinism, supporting the intergroup contact theory: in countries with more intra-EU migration, welfare chauvinism tends to be lower. Furthermore, the higher the percentage of East European immigrants compared to other EU immigrants, the higher the level of welfare chauvinism.

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In recent years, many countries have faced pressure to cut the costs of the welfare state, and different strategies have been utilized to achieve this, including stricter eligibility requirements, reduced level of benefits, and reduced maximum duration of benefits. This contribution reports the results from a Norwegian survey designed to measure which of these strategies the general population would prefer in a situation where the government has to tighten various social security schemes. For a given reduction in total costs, there is a trade-off between the desire to avoid large individual benefit reductions and the desire to protect some groups of benefit recipients from any cuts. Different preferences for how to retrench the welfare state will reflect how individuals trade off these concerns. We find a striking association between political affiliation and preferred retrenchment strategy. Right-wingers typically prefer to tighten the eligibility criteria, while left-wingers typically prefer to reduce the benefit level. Furthermore, our results indicate that labor market outsiders are less in favor of tightening the eligibility criteria, but more in favor of reducing the maximum duration of benefits, than labor market insiders.This article contributes to the literature on welfare state retrenchment by examining which retrenchment strategy that the public prefers, which in turn sheds light on which measures that are likely to receive popular support from different demographics in the population.

This article identifies how labour migrants' participation in undeclared work is triggered by a combination of voluntary exit from the formal labour market in the host country as well as structures that makes it more likely for this type of worker to be forced to accept unregistered work. The argument is built by examining how East-West European Union migration can foster or reinforce reasons for participating in undeclared work. At the EU level, the issue of undeclared work is seen as a mounting challenge, and public discussion now associates a supposed increase in undeclared work with the EU's open borders. For this study, 74 semistructured interviews were conducted with Polish labour migrants in Norway -both temporary migrants and more settled ones. A substantial part of these interviews focused on undeclared work. The results indicate that immigration enhances as well as creates new reasons for participating in undeclared work. In particular, they highlight how decisions to participate in undeclared work are not just an effect of labour market dynamics, but also a question of social integration.