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Abstract
Social assistance programs and the related literature are proliferating globally. This article conducts a critical systematic review of the literature with objective and transparent selection criteria and illustrates two major shortcomings: First, the literature is largely descriptive and impact-oriented as analytical studies on the determinants/causes of social assistance programs are relatively under-examined. Second, it identifies a gap in the literature, which emanates from the relative under-examination of political, and especially contentious political, factors in scholarly analyses of determinants/causes of social assistance programs in comparison to structuralist, institutional, and ideational approaches.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Data availability statement
The data is produced by the authors and shared as “Supplemental Material”. Advanced search strings that the authors utilized to build the data are attached to the Appendix. https://github.com/fuatkina/Political-Determinants-of-Social-Assistance-Policies
Supplementary Material
Supplementary data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/13876988.2022.2098721.
Notes
1. While we deploy a systematic approach to our case selection, we acknowledge that some time periods and some geographical regions of the world may be underrepresented in our dataset and that our conclusions are not representative of the entire social assistance literature. Notwithstanding, we contend that our study points out a wider trend in this literature, in which contentious political factors are relatively less examined.
2. Since categories are not consistent with each other for the two sources, we made our decisions according to source-specific filters. For Scopus, we looked for the disciplines of “Social Sciences, Economics and Arts”, and we included a series of social science-related subfields for Web of Science. For details, please see in Appendix.
3. Please see Figure P1.1 in Appendix.
4. Although there is an overall trend towards the expansion of the social assistance literature, we acknowledge that there may a temporal bias in our case selection. Although our case selection is not oriented towards the 2000s, there is an obvious increase in publications relative to, say, the 1980s. This may also be related to our failure to capture the keywords that were used to represent social assistance policies in the 1980s. But we believe that this bias is minimal and that our findings are indicative of general temporal trends in the literature.
5. To test whether scientific impacts of publications vary across our classification of determinants of social assistance, we checked the transformation of citation numbers according to four groups. Figures in Part 5 in the Appendix ( and ) show the timely change of the citation numbers per paper and yearly adjusted average citation numbers for the four determinant types. According to the figures, the citation is more likely a function of the year than the determinant type. Therefore, the scientific impacts of articles belonging to any of the four groups do not significantly vary.
6. Please see Part 7 and Part 8 in the Appendix for the debate on the association of welfare regimes and social assistance program types with the four overall determinants and the three political determinants. We also present relevant figures there. – and Figure P8.3 demonstrate scholarly focus on the determinants of social assistance across program types, welfare regimes, and initiation year of these programs, while Figures P8.1 and P8.2 shows the relationship between political determinants and program types.
7. Our data collection strategy was based on keywords which are thought to represent social assistance-related publications (the details are in the Appendix) Yet we also acknowledge that we may have missed some important work on the contentious politics of social assistance, such as Ciccia, R; Guzmán-Concha, C. 2021, Protest and Social Policies for Outsiders: The Expansion of Social Pensions in Latin America. Journal of Social Policy, 1–22. This is because we are searching for the keywords in the title, which makes this study feasible, and we missed the phrase “Social Policies for Outsiders”, which indirectly refers to social assistance policies.
8. The incidence of each category is presented in the figure. The percentages in the first categorization – impact, descriptive, and determinant papers – are estimated from Figure P4.1 in the Appendix, which depends on a random sample.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Erdem Yörük
Erdem Yörük is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Koç University and an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He serves as the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Emerging Welfare” (The New Politics of Welfare: Towards an “Emerging Markets” Welfare State Regime) (emw.ku.edu.tr) and the H2020 project Social Comquant (socialcomquant.ku.edu.tr). He is also a member of Young Academy of Europe and an associate editor of European Review. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University (2012). His work focuses on social welfare and social policy, social movements, political sociology, and computational social sciences. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Ford Foundation, FP7 Marie Curie CIG, European Research Council StG, ERC PoC, H2020, and the Science Academy of Turkey. His projects have created two datasets on welfare (glow.ku.edu.tr) and protest movements (glocon.ku.edu.tr). His articles have appeared in World Development, Governance, Politics & Society, Journal of European Social Policy, New Left Review, Current Sociology, South Atlantic Quarterly, American Behavioral Scientist, International Journal of Communication, Social Policy and Administration, and Social Indicators Research, among others. His book, The Politics of the Welfare State in Turkey, was published by the University of Michigan Press in May 2022.
Mehmet Fuat Kina
M. Fuat Kına is a PhD candidate at the Sociology Department of Koç University, and a researcher at the European Commission funded Social ComQuant project. He graduated with a B.S. degree in Economics from Boğaziçi University (2015) and received his master’s degree with a statistical analysis on the relationship between anti-immigrant attitudes and labor precarity in Europe (2018) from İstanbul Şehir University. He currently works on social movement dynamics and social assistance programs. He is interested in advanced quantitative techniques on causal inference and computational social sciences.
Ali Bargu
Ali Bargu holds a D.Phil. from the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford obtained with his work on the Politics of Social Assistance Expansion in Emerging Market Economies. He obtained his M.Sc. in Comparative Social Policy from the University of Oxford in 2016, focusing on social security and protection, redistribution through the tax and benefit system, and quantitative methods. In 2015, he received his B.A. in Integrated Social Sciences from Jacobs University Bremen, funded by the Vodafone Foundation “Chancen” Scholarship and was admitted to the German National Academic Foundation. Between 2016-17, he worked as a Consultant for the Social Protection and Labor Unit at the World Bank Group in Washington DC.