 2015 - 2016 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 1411-2132-01 | Welfare Law | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| FACULTY OF LAW | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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University credit hours: 2.0
Course description
Welfare Law and Social Security – Dr. Yishai Mishor, Yael Havassy-Aharoni
Social policy constitutes a major part of the government activity in the modern state. A high proportion of the national expenditure is dedicated to social security; heavy legal and bureaucratic systems operate in order to provide welfare services; and welfare policy dilemmas play a dominant role on the political debate as well as on the media.
The course examines the welfare policy in Israel from both a legal and a political point of view, and provides an insight into key concepts in welfare policy and social security. It focuses on burning current matters as well as on issues at the heart of academic research. We will discuss subjects such as the poverty trap, social payments, economic inequality, birth rate, and participation in the labour market, emphasising on the constitutional, budgetary and political aspects that shape public policy in those matters. We will also deal with recent economic, demographic and other social changes in Western countries, including the phenomenon of globalisation, which shape 21st century social security systems. The present socio-economic situation in Israel will be also discussed.
The course provides a practical approach to welfare policy, examining the daily experience of interaction with the social system. Those who are supported by social security and other welfare systems are affected not only by welfare legislation but also by its implementation by institutions and administrators. In this context, we will discuss the power relations between social security systems and the recipients, some of them poor and disadvantaged who find it difficult to claim their rights.
The first part of the course presents the fundamentals of social security, i.e. the definition, the purpose and the development of models and concepts that seek to explain social security. In this part we will also deal with constitutional aspects of welfare policy, including the normative status of social security as a human right and as a protected constitutional right in the Israeli legal system.
The second part of the course focuses on specific branches of the Israeli welfare system (maternal insurance, child support, unemployment insurance, income support, negative income tax, old age insurance, housing assistance) and a variety of transversal topics (selective vs. universal payments, poverty trap, pro-active welfare policy, family structure, gender equality, dependency ratio and privatization, bureaucracy and accessibility). Each lecture will consider a social security branch and discuss one of the above mentioned transversal topics.