The paper investigates public attitudes toward welfare state policies as a result of both situational, i.e. unemployment, and ideological factors, i.e. egalitarian ideology, at both the individual and national level. The dependent variables are public support for the sick and the old as well as for the unemployed as target beneficiaries of welfare state policies. Data from the ISSP-study «Role of government» are analyzed using a multi-level regression technique. Findings indicate that the nation level is important in shaping public attitudes toward welfare state policies in industrialized nations, and that both situational and ideological factors play a role. Apparently, various nations generate different public beliefs about national social problems and about the relationship between individuals, the state and other institutions. Eventually, these understandings and beliefs influence popular attitudes regarding what kind of policies the state should pursue, and who should benefit.
We review the main theoretical conclusions from a quarter century of comparative studies of welfare states in the affluent democracies. We contrast early debates over the relative importance of industrialization, economic growth, and social classes for explaining welfare state differences with contemporary claims about the role of globalization, postindustrialism, and gender relations in shaping their futures. We evaluate the claims against recent empirical evidence with the aim of highlighting both important lessons from the past and promising directions for future analysis.
This article uses the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS) and the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) to examine two issues: the relationship of work characteristics, family characteristics, and work-family spillover to perceptions of work-family balance; and models of "gender difference" versus "gender similarity." The GSS analysis supports the gender similarity model. It demonstrates that work demands such as the number of hours worked per week and work spillover into family life are the most salient predictors of feelings of imbalance for both women and men. The NSCW includes subtler measures of family spillover into work as well as measures of specific job characteristics and child care. The NSCW results support a gender difference model. They indicate that when family demands reduce work quality, there is a decreased likelihood of perceived balance. However, men and women experience balance in gendered ways. Women report more balance when they give priority to family; men report less balance when they have no personal time for themselves due to work and more balance when they make scheduling changes due to family.
Individuals have the capacity to form new support networks following a move to assisted living, and relationships formed become more salient to their well-being than the continuation of past relationships or the physical characteristics of the immediate surroundings.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.