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Do wage-setting institutions, such as collective bargaining, improve health and, if so, is this because they reduce income inequality? Wage-setting institutions are often assumed to improve health because they increase earnings and reduce inequality and yet, while individual-level studies suggest higher earnings improve well being, the direct effects of these institutions on mortality remains unclear. This paper explores both the relationship between wage-setting institutions and mortality rates whether income inequality mediates this relationship. Using 50 years of data from 22 high-income countries (n ~ 825), I find mortality rates are lower in countries with collective bargaining compared to places with little or no wage protection. While wage-setting institutions may reduce economic inequality, these institutions do not appear to improve health because they reduce inequality. Instead, collective bargaining improves health, in part, because they increase average wage growth. The political and economic drivers of inequality may not, then, be correlated with health outcomes, and, as a result, health scholars need to develop more nuanced theories of the political economy of health that are separate from but in dialogue with the political economy of inequality.

[S]hort-term policy changes can have long-term effects on the health and well-being of the population.

Imposing financial penalties on claimants of unemployment insurance may incentivise labour market re-entry. However, sanctions may have differential effects depending on the work-readiness of the claimants. Here, I explore whether sanctioning disabled claimants is associated with greater labour market activity or inactivity among disabled people data on 346 British local authorities between 2009 and 2014. When the number of sanctioned disabled claimants rises (as a proportion of all claimants), the disability rate among economically inactive people becomes larger. There is no clear relationship between sanctioning disabled claimants and the employed disability rate.

While parental encouragement or parent-led consumption transmits cultural practices from parents to children, the reasons parents provide regarding why they encourage cultural engagement remains unclear. Using music as a case study, and through analysing semi-structured interviews, this research explores how parents express and actualise their desire for their children to learn to play a musical instrument. Results suggest that respondents do not strongly associate musical practice with developing valued character traits nor with social or educational attainment. Instead, parental encouragement to play music is shaped by family ties and the parental perception of 'natural' talent in their children. Parental perception of natural talent is most common among parents who themselves play an instrument and among those parents who play music with their children. Family and musicality are the most commonly cited reasons for encouraging music and these are found among all educational groups. Without dismissing the importance of social position, this evidence suggests that parents articulate their preferences toward musical participation in terms of familial cohesion and shared identity.

What is the relationship between social stratification and arts participation? Because the barriers to both participation and consumption vary, the relationship between the social strata and arts participation may differ from the relationship between social strata and arts consumption. Using three pooled waves of the Taking-Part survey ( N = 78,011), I estimate latent class and multinomial logistic models to examine the association between education, social status, social class, and income with patterns of arts participation. Five latent clusters are observed and both social status and social class are insignificantly associated with each cluster. In contrast, education remains strongly correlated with most forms of arts participation. These results indicate that arts participation, as a constituent part of 'lifestyle', is not primarily explained through social status or social class but rather through education.

Correlations between social class and sport participation have frequently been observed ( Crook 1997 ; Ceron-Anaya 2010 ; Dollman and Lewis 2010 ; Stalsberg and Pedersen 2010 ). However, discrete associations between occupational class positions and specific sporting activities overlook the complex interrelationships amongst these sports. Until recently understanding the relationality of sport has been constrained by a lack of available and appropriate data. Work by Bourdieu (1984) , and more recently Bennett et al. (2009) , have explored the general field of cultural consumption and sport has been one dimension of these treatments. Using multiple correspondence analysis ( Le Roux and Rouanet 2004 ), this research focuses upon the social space of sport participation in Britain in order to provide a more detailed account of how these activities are organised. From data in the Taking-Part Survey (n = 10,349), which was gathered between July 2005-October 2006, 19 sporting practices are situated along four key dimensions. The first dimension separates gender and corresponds to a division between an embodied or social focus. Dimension two captures the impact of age. Internal and external orientations divide dimension three, where men tend to be internally oriented. Class, education and social status are significant along this dimension. Dimension four differentiates self-employed and manual workers; reinforcing occupational and educational differences. Consequently, the social space of sports participation cannot be neatly contained within the logic of class; other explanations drawing on friendship, education and embodiment are also required.

Collective bargaining institutions are correlated with better population health. However, there are still major gaps in our understanding regarding the impact of collective bargaining on health inequalities, particularly between labour market 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. In this study, we investigate the effect of collective bargaining coverage on individuals' self-rated health, and whether the impact varies according to labour market status. We use four waves of the European Values Survey (1981-2018) and three-level nested random intercept models across 33 OECD and European countries (N = 66 301). We find that stronger and more inclusive collective bargaining institutions reduce health inequalities between the unemployed and the employed by disproportionately improving the health of the unemployed. This study implies that targeting the political institutions that shape the distribution of power and resources is important for reducing health inequalities.

AbstractCollective bargaining institutions are correlated with better population health. However, there are still major gaps in our understanding regarding the impact of collective bargaining on health inequalities, particularly between labour market 'insiders' and 'outsiders'. In this study, we investigate the effect of collective bargaining coverage on individuals' self-rated health, and whether the impact varies according to labour market status. We use four waves of the European Values Survey (1981–2018) and three-level nested random intercept models across 33 OECD and European countries (N = 66 301). We find that stronger and more inclusive collective bargaining institutions reduce health inequalities between the unemployed and the employed by disproportionately improving the health of the unemployed. This study implies that targeting the political institutions that shape the distribution of power and resources is important for reducing health inequalities.

Background Income inequality is associated with poor health when economic disparities are especially salient. Yet, political institutions may alter this relationship because democracies (as opposed to autocracies) may be more inclined to frame inequalities in negative rather than positive ways. Living in a particular political system potentially alters the messages individuals receive about whether inequality is large or small, good or bad, and this, in turn, might affect whether beliefs about inequality influence health. Further, media coverage of economic inequality may negatively affect health if it contributes toward the general perception that the gap between rich and poor has gone up, even if there has been no change in income differentials. Methods In this study, we explore the relationship between democracy, perceptions of inequality, and self-rated health across 28 post-communist countries using survey and macro-level data, multilevel regression models, and inverse probability weighting to estimate the average treatment effect on the treated. Results We find that self-rated health is higher in more democratic countries and lower among people who believe that inequality has risen in the last few years. Moreover, we observe that people in democracies are more likely to learn about rising inequality through watching television and that when they do it has a more harmful effect on their health than when people in autocracies learn about rising inequality through the same channel, suggesting that in countries where there is less trust in the television media learning about rising inequality is not as harmful for health. Conclusions Our results indicate that while democracies are generally good for well-being, they may not be unambiguously positive for health. This does not mean, of course, that inequality is good for health nor that, on average, autocracies have better health than democracies; but rather that being more aware of inequality can negatively affect self-rated health.

Recessions appear to coincide with an increasingly stigmatising presentation of poverty in parts of the media. Previous research on the connection between high unemployment and media discourse has often relied on case studies of periods when stigmatising rhetoric about the poor was increasing. We build on earlier work on how economic context affects media representations of poverty by creating a unique dataset that measures how often stigmatising descriptions of the poor are used in five centrist and right-wing British newspapers between 1896 and 2000. Our results suggest stigmatising rhetoric about the poor increases when unemployment rises, except at the peak of very deep recessions (e.g. the 1930s and 1980s). This pattern is consistent with the idea that newspapers deploy deeply embedded Malthusian explanations for poverty when those ideas resonate with the economic context, and so this stigmatising rhetoric of recessions is likely to recur during future economic crises.

Underpinned by the assumption that unemployed persons are passive recipients of social security, recent welfare reforms have increased benefit conditionality in the UK and introduced harsher penalties for failure to meet these conditions. Yet, conditionality may result in vulnerable groups disproportionately experiencing disentitlement from benefits, one of the rights of social citizenship, because they are, in some cases, less able to meet these conditions. Rising sanctions, then, may be the product of a disconnection between welfare conditionality and the capabilities of vulnerable claimants. To test this hypothesis, we evaluate whether sanctions are higher in areas where there are more vulnerable Jobseeker's Allowance claimants, namely, lone parents, ethnic minorities and those with disabilities. We find that sanction rates are higher in local authorities where more claimants are lone parents or live with a disability, and that this relationship has strengthened since the welfare reforms were introduced under the Conservative-led coalition. Failure to meet conditions of benefit receipt may disproportionately affect vulnerable groups.