Is it better to live in a big country than a small one? In this paper, I examine whether economic and social conditions vary systematically with the population of a country. Economics provides a number of theoretical reasons why country size should matter, for instance, because of increasing returns to scale or because it is easier to provide public goods to a larger populace. However, there is...

Racial/ethnic disproportionality in the child welfare system is a complicated social problem that is receiving increasing amounts of attention from researchers and practitioners. This review of the literature examines disproportionality in the front-end of the child welfare system and interventions that may address it. While none of the interventions had evidence suggesting that they reduced di...

Three perspectives on the efficacy of social capital have been explored in the public health literature. A "social support" perspective argues that informal networks are central to objective and subjective welfare; an "inequality" thesis posits that widening economic disparities have eroded citizens' sense of social justice and inclusion, which in turn has led to heightened anxiety and compromi...

Although homelessness is inherently associated with social exclusion, homeless individuals are rarely included in conventional studies on social exclusion. Use of longitudinal survey data from a cohort study on homeless people in four major Dutch cities (n = 378) allowed to examine: changes in indicators of social exclusion among homeless people over a 2.5-year period after reporting to the soc...

In this paper we build a model to examine inequality of process and inequality of outcomes in interest group politics. The model has the following features: (i) interest groups which compete for rents in a noncooperative game, (ii) a self-interested rent-setting political decision maker (iii) democratic or popular pressure as a check on the self-interest of the political decision maker. We allo...

This paper is concerned with the interlinked issues of citizenship and the structured dependency of older people within Social Gerontology. It argues that implicit in much British Social Gerontology is a strategy of advancing the wellbeing of elderly people through the extension of citizenship rights. Absence of these rights leads to poverty, exclusion and ageism being commonplace experiences o...