Ideas about Social Rights: Changing Social Assistance in Britain and Ireland, 1985-2015

Thesis

This thesis examines the significance of ideas of social rights in shaping social assistance policies for the unemployed and lone parents in Britain and Ireland over the period 1985-2015. Adopting a qualitative, comparative case study approach and based on a combination of elite interviews and primary and secondary data analysis, the study finds that different ideas about social rights account for substantive and otherwise unexplained social assistance policy variation across Britain and Ireland. A blended human rights-positive rights idea was consistently relevant to Irish social policy-making while varying ideas of positive rights and social citizenship rights were associated respectively with periods of Conservative and Labour Party governance in Britain. The thesis shows that cultural legacies and political ideologies were significant in determining the ideas of rights that became salient in each country context, suggesting important three-way interactions between ideas, interests and institutions and lending support to theoretical arguments about the ‘mutual constitution’ both of ideas and interests, and of interests and institutions.

Authors: Fox-Ruhs, C

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: ideas and public policy; Britain; social rights; social assistance; Ireland
• Subjects: Politics and government; Social policy