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A heated debate focused on the impact of multiculturalism and ethnic heterogeneity on welfare state generosity has emerged in recent years. At the center of the debate is the argument that ethnic heterogeneity undermines support for the welfare state for several reasons. Prominent among these is the difficulty of creating broad social solidarity in an ethnically divided society: solidarity which is allegedly necessary for sustaining public support for the welfare state. This study explores the "heterogeneity undermines the welfare state" logic in the context of welfare state politics in Israel. Israel would appear to be a near-perfect example of how ethnic and religious heterogeneity strains social solidarity and, in turn, undermines the welfare state. Quite differently from most studies, however, this work's emphasis is not on public attitudes or voting, but on the political interaction between economically disadvantaged ethnic minorities - specifically Arabs on the one hand and orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews on the other - in the welfare field. It is argued that shared interests enable extensive cooperation among political elites in the welfare field despite religiously-and nationally-based antagonism. Elite politics combined with low public visibility facilitate such cooperation, which appears at first unthinkable. Nevertheless, interest-based welfare coalitions of this type are shallow in the sense that they tend to be ad-hoc, focus on a narrow range of issues and are particularly vulnerable to government divide and rule tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributions to the public administration literature have debated for more than a decade the merit of claims that the policy process and environment has moved from governmentdominated to New Governance. New Governance is said to involve the use of 'soft' policy instruments, such as moral suasion, on the one hand, and far less use of coercive means, on the other. This study explores the introduction of 'new accountability' to nongovernment schools, in Australia and Israel, as an illustration of the use of diverse policy instruments in a New Governance setting. It is argued that even in the presence of powerful private actors, on which policy implementation depends, governments employ coercive policy instruments. However, to be effective, these policy instruments must be combined with 'softer' instruments. Furthermore, the article also demonstrates the limits for the use of 'soft' instruments, or even 'soft-hard' instruments mixes. Under circumstances in which public and private interests conflict, there is little that governments could do in a New Governance policy setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractHistorically, faith-based organizations made important contributions in the field of social provision, but with the advent of the modern welfare state, their role diminished dramatically. This article examines and explains the renewed interest in the United States and Britain in publicly funded faith-based social provision. Despite significant differences between the two countries, their governments have endorsed strikingly similar faith-based initiatives that have institutionalized the relationship between the state and faith-based organizations. This study explains the emergence of faith-based initiatives as one component of welfare state restructuring, and more specifically, as a response to the growing problem of minority' social exclusion in urban areas. Finally, the article explores the possibility of the policy's spread to other countries. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that the spread of privatization of delivery in social services - that is privatization of provision while funding remains public - has not proceeded uniformly across different policy domains. Certain differences in the attributes of policy domains are responsible for the variance in the incidence and extent of privatization of delivery. The paper examines two such attributes: the size of policy domains and the prevalence of professional philosophies that support institutional restructuring for reasons other than privatization. By utilizing a comparison of privatization of delivery initiatives in the education and mental health domains, across two political systems - England and Massachusetts - this study suggests that privatization of delivery is more difficult in large policy domains than in small ones and that privatization is facilitated by the pre-existence of dominant professional philosophies that demand institutional restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]