Continuity and Change in Social Policy

Abstract

Abstract While much has been written over the last two decades about social policy continuity and change, the literature is often fragmentary and imprecise, with little material exploring it in a systematic and rigorous manner. The objective of this article is to provide a critical reading of the recent literature, discussing concepts and issues such as paradigm shift, path dependence, punctuated equilibrium, ideational analysis and cumulative change (including conversion, layering and policy drift). It examines the degree and type of change, and explanations for change: the ‘how much, what type and why of change’. The article concludes with an overview of the contributions of this special issue of Social Policy & Administration devoted to the issues of policy continuity and change.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 67 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.